THE TRANSFORMATION OF SARATOGA

In the last few days I’ve been reading stories about the idyllic Californian town I’ve called home for seventeen years. The city's evolution mirrors the transformation of Silicon Valley.

Satsuma oranges by the hundreds outside a home on Scotland Drive, Saratoga

In 2004, sixteen years after living in San Jose’s Almaden Valley, we moved fourteen miles up north to the city of Saratoga in Silicon Valley. It was a move fraught with doubt and anxiety. The prices of homes were already sky-high in Silicon Valley and during our search for potential houses, we kept losing out to others in a bidding war. One home was the answer to most of our requirements and when I walked into the place for the first time, I felt I was stepping into the warmth of an embrace.

“It does have great chi, doesn’t it?” said the realtor who welcomed us into the house. This “vital life force,” chi, is believed to be the force that binds together all things in the universe. I felt the emotional pull right away and I found myself responding with my gut before even attempting to scrutinize the property with my brain. My husband reacted similarly although all his instinctive responses to the chi went right out of the window the second he looked at the sticker price yet again.

The house ultimately became ours and we moved in just as a million white flecks from the cherry blossom tree in the backyard floated down to the swimming pool below. This tiny city (population 30,000) began to belong to us as our family navigated the school system. We made new friends in the neighborhood.

It’s said that every town has a vibe. Paris has chic. Amsterdam exhales romance. Singapore is about control and caution. In New York even the most pedestrian penne arrabbiata assumes a glow of consequence and arrogance. One of my favorite cities in the world, Berlin, is always thinking and ruminating.

The ubiquitous overhead electrical lines of the city of Saratoga.

Saratoga’s vibe, in contrast, is somnolence. Its languor sticks to one’s body like a squirt of orange juice on the wrist. Saratoga is soothing as the fuzz on the derriere of an apricot. Saratoga is so still that it’s boring. Saratoga has no streetlights. This laidback town—it’s really a hamlet—is just one mile from the icon of Tech avant-garde, Apple. The city is so passé that all the Teslas, the Jaguars and the BMWs that roar down its roads must roll their eyes. Saratoga frowns right back, mind you, at keyless cars and at flushed car doors with unseen door handles. Saratoga wears the electric, telephone and cable wires crisscrossing its skies like military adornments. This antediluvian town does not give a fig for what anyone thinks of it for it knows that that, too, is part of its multimillion-dollar charm, and that in a world of rapidly upgrading software and ephemeral passions, some things shall remain sacrosanct over hundreds of years.

The name for the city of Saratoga went through several iterations. Ray Cosyn, an 84-year-old historian at Saratoga Historical Foundation, is a treasure trove of stories about the Silicon Valley, IBM, Singapore, Winston Churchill and General Douglas MacArthur. An ex-IBMer, Ray is a gifted storyteller who, between momentary memory lapses, recalls in vivid detail great moments in world history as well as the milestones of the city of Saratoga. He told me how, in a span of twenty years, the settlement around which Saratoga shaped itself underwent five name changes: Campbell’s Gap, named after William Campbell who built a saw mill to cater to the needs of the growing lumber industry of the area; Toll Gate, for the road that businessman Martin McCarty built; McCartysville after McCarty himself; Bank Mills, after Charles Maclay who built a water wheel for the needs of local industries; and, “Saratoga”, following the discovery of mineral content in the waters of the local creek that evoked the quality of the waters at New York’s Saratoga Springs. The name “Saratoga” itself is an Iroquois Indian word (“Se-rach-to-que”) meaning, literally, “floating scum upon the water” alluding to the mineral deposits presenting as a film on the surface of still water. 

For years, I had driven past several historical properties on the road connecting the cities of Saratoga and Los Gatos but I had never thought once to find out more about them. My six months in Singapore—which began with a two week quarantine in a hotel room in Singapore’s shopping mecca—made me question my total lack of curiosity in the place I called home. The day after emerging from our self-quarantine in Saratoga, my husband and I decided to stop by the museum curated by the Saratoga Historical Foundation which narrates the story, broadly, of California itself.

For centuries, this region of the San Francisco Bay Area was inhabited by the indigenous Ohlone Indians, known today as Costanoan and the Muwekma peoples. Digs at archaeological sites here in the South Bay have shown that the area was home to fifty “tribes” and that there were major settlements as early as 8,000 BCE. In 1769, the Spanish king ordered land and sea expeditions to depart from Mexico to California. He also sent military troops and Franciscan missionaries to the new land. Franciscan priest Father Junipero Serra founded the first mission in 1769; in all, 21 missions were built along the Pacific coast. By 1776, 240 men, women and children crossed mountains and deserts from Arizona (Tubac) into California. Captain Juan Bautista de Anza who led the pack is believed to have stopped in Saratoga while trudging north from Monterey to San Francisco. A monument to Anza stands at the intersection of two of the Saratoga’s oldest thoroughfares, Saratoga Avenue and Big Basin Way.

A walk around our Saratoga neighborhood; a new house now where a decrepit old house once languished. Two books I found at the museum. A painted junction box. Monument to Captain Anza and to Saratoga’s founding. An oleander shrub.

According to Saratoga’s First Hundred Years by the late historian Florence Cunningham, a local newspaper of the late nineteenth century reported on how “Saratoga was a notorious town in the eighties with its sawmills and lumbering back in the mountains.” In frontier towns like Saratoga, people sauntered in after a day’s work at the lumber mills to drink, dine and have a good time. Big Basin Way, the place that houses my favorite haunts for citron tea and orange cake, used to be a shady place with “painted women” and at least seven saloons. Drunken brawls, some murders, a few disappearances and ghost sightings once happened in its main drag. Despite the wild image, the town was known for its industrious population at the turn of the 19th century. It was situated on a stream and the supply of timber and fuel were unlimited. Saratoga was thus home to a furniture factory, paper mills, and flour mills and more. While the flour mills were built to cater to a valley that produced wheat, paper manufacture (from straw) was an important addition, too; until then, paper had to be brought into California by ship from the Atlantic Coast.

As I learned about Saratoga’s past, California’s history also began to unravel itself. Saratoga’s evolution from a lumber town to an industrial town, the establishment of fruit orchards that packed produce for canning around the country and the parallel growth of vineyards that dotted the countryside show how this tiny town of thirteen square miles overhauled itself to change with the times. Over the decades, horse carriages and the Interurban railroads (that connected big cities with suburbs) were supplanted by cars in the early part of the twentieth century.

Peninsular Interurban (PI). before Henry Ford rolled out his model T and the Wright Brothers pulled off sustained flight.

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…”Smell of the prune blossoms in March and April and then later the smell of dry yards and sulfur smoke during the apricot harvest followed by the sweet smell of prunes drying during September. The boxes being stacked alongside the orchards full of fruit to be picked up by the trucks and the tent camps of the migrant laborers springing up alongside the roads and the edges of the dry yards with all of the little kids running around.”

~~~GULCHIN’ OUT, Vince S. Garrod

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It’s more than six decades since Saratoga was an agricultural hub. By the 1960s, its lands were slowly parceled off to real estate developers. A  large part of Saratoga was built in the sixties by three brothers—George Day, Jim Day and Marion Day. Our home was one among the George Day homes built in 1962. A friend of ours, Guy Lohman, who moved into Saratoga in 1964, grew up in a home much like ours on Kilbride Drive. He remembers being surrounded by orchards. “As we drove out to Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road onto Glasgow and then to Miljevich, there were orchards on either side of the road, not houses,” he recalled.

It’s so hard to visualize it today. In the sixties, before Mr. Miljevich sold the land in order to pay his taxes, the neat rows of apricot, plum, and cherry trees may have looked like the city’s Heritage Orchard flanking Saratoga’s fantastic library. The photograph below—taken in 1966 by Guy Lohman—offers an aerial view of Saratoga; it was shot from his father’s plane, a V-tailed Bonanza, in which dad and son flew across the country several times. Guy said he saw so much of the country from a small plane hovering just a few thousand feet above the ground.

Photo by Guy Lohman. Aerial view of Saratoga’s Golden Triangle in 1966, looking south, bounded on the right by Saratoga-Sunnyvale Rd., Saratoga Ave. diagonally on the upper left, and Cox Ave.diagonally along the lower left.  

In the sixties, most families that moved into Saratoga had fathers employed at IBM (South San Jose), Fairchild (South San Jose) or Lockheed (Moffett Field in Mountain View). Then, as now, Saratoga was associated with money. Guy’s parents chose to move to Saratoga because of the reputation of the public schools just as our family did decades later.  Guy recalls how Cupertino was not prized then for its schools and that money from Apple eventually molded it into what it is today. At IBM, Guy’s father managed the lab that developed disk drives at the main plant site. Like most women in the sixties, his mother was a homemaker. Guy and his three sisters attended the local school system.

Then too as now, Saratoga was not rippling with night life. “If you think Saratoga is sleepy now,” Guy said, “you just can’t imagine how sleepy it was then!” There was little to do and nerdy as he was, and especially under the strict gaze of his parents, Guy spent his time doing homework and focusing on good grades. When he graduated in 1967 from Saratoga High School, the demographics was “lily white”. By the time our children graduated decades later—in 2008 and 2012—the makeup was very different. Saratoga’s demographics was, once again, determined by the buying power of a handful of high tech professionals, with one glaring difference, of course. They were from many different ethnic backgrounds.

Saratoga has changed and its evolution mirrors the changes around the nation. I recalled how a couple of years ago one afternoon, when I stepped into a garment shop in Saratoga Village, the shop owner lamented the changing values in her community owing to the changing demographics of the place. She told me how her parents had made their way into Saratoga from Eastern Europe and how she once played in the orchards now swallowed by a highway. A little later, she badmouthed all the other “new” people who had entered her town, forgetting how her parents had done the same thing decades before simply in search of a better future.

Since my return from Singapore ten days ago, I’ve realized how a minor detail connected Singapore and the far east to Saratoga for a time: Opium. At the height of its infamy, Saratoga apparently had quite a reputation for both alcohol and opium dens. “To be a ‘drunk from Saratoga’ was the last word in drunkenness”, writes Florence Cunningham. Today, Saratoga is a quaint place with tract homes, mega mansions, wineries, wedding venues, schools, churches, an enormous library and a funeral parlor. Wherever you turn, it’s possible to catch a stunning view of the hills. Chances are that that every street you turn into is flush with orange, apple or apricot trees. The little city’s main thoroughfare, Big Basin Way, once saw horse drawn wagons, bells tinkling, dragging lumber through the town. It is a scenic drive today connecting the Bay Area to seaside towns. The story of Saratoga’s own transformation is the quintessential tale of Silicon Valley’s overhaul from an agricultural center to a high tech hub.

What once was a rowdy Saratoga Village is now gentrified. By day, my husband and I have sipped wine at a stylish wine bar called Cinnabar. My children and their friends have been spotted drinking at a popular watering hole called The Bank. I often go to Big Basin Café (on Big Basin Way) when I wish to write in peace.  Still, when it comes to night life, my husband and I don’t want to be caught dead—never mind that the old Madronia cemetery is next door—in the downtown area of Saratoga. I’m waiting for the evening vibes to change in a place that has altered so much since Captain Anza first trekked through the land on horseback in 1775.

These bells were suspended from an arch, with the ends fitting on a horse’s harness. Horse drawn wagons pulling lumber would announce their presence on the roads by ringing these bells.