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March 2007
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Most joyfully, the feast of St. Patrick falls on a Saturday this year. That means that things will be hopping in dozens of pubs around the bay! Are you ready to have a great time? There are tons of opportunities, including right here in Los Gatos!
But first, do you know who St. Patrick was? And do you know why the date is celebrated? Briefly, St. Patrick was not Irish himself, but was a missionary (and a priest who'd become a bishop) in the land where he was once held a slave after being abducted by pirates. St. Patrick died on March 17th, in possibly 461 or 493 - as with many saints, we're not entirely sure. (Catholics celebrate as a feast day not one's birthday, but one's death day - as it is considered birth into heaven.) And yes, how typical for the Irish to celebrate a death with drinking! I'm sure you've heard of Irish wakes. To "wake" the dead is really to lay the person out for a period of grieving (and remembering, and celebrating) before the funeral. An added advantage is to allow enough time to see if he or she isn't simply comatose instead of dead. You wouldn't want to be buried alive! Enough on drinking and dead people....
So where are the local parties?
Each year, the biggest blowout in Los Gatos for St. Paddy's Day happens at CB Hannigan's, located just off N. Santa Cruz Avenue (close to Highway 9) at 208 Bachman Avenue. It's an all-day Festival with live music and rowdy good times. Tel 395-1223 Hannigan's actually has events every single day this week leading up to Saturday's bash. St. Patrick's Day tickets are $50, must be bought in person at the bar.
Another spot that's bound to be filled on Saturday is #1 Broadway, located not on Broadway, but near it at 102 S. Santa Cruz Avenue. The band Sage will be performing at 9:30pm - $10 cover charge. Tel 408.354.4303
There are many more pubs around Silicon Valley with St. Patrick's Day events too.
And apart from the pubs?
Wonderful performances are always found at nearby Montalvo! The Black Brothers (an Irish family) Concert is on St. Patrick's Day at 8pm and it sounds great.
And in Sunnyvale, The Golden Bough is being performed at the Sunnyvale Community Theater (550 E. Remington).
For more events in the greater San Jose area this Saturday, click here.
And something fun I stumbled onto is a site which is a bit about the Irish language, with brief audio clips of words & phrases in Irish. It is all on the All About Irish site.
So Happy St. Patrick's Day! Remember to wear your green!!
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One of Los Gatos's More Haunted Haunts
Yesterday, an article I wrote about Haunted Real Estate was published on Real Town. I have received a ton of emails about ghosts and people's experiences with them in the last 24 hours! I have never had so much fun reading email.
So I thought you folks might like to know about some of our haunted spots, right here in beautiful, charming, upscale Los Gatos. There are so many stories that it's hard to know where to begin!! Today I will address just one of these interesting locations. More to follow in later entries, I promise! This will be "Mary Pope-Handy's Los Gatos Ghost Tour".
Cemeteries tend to give people the creeps, so let's start there. If you are local to Los Gatos, you probably know that the Los Gatos Memorial Park is actually in San Jose, with a Cambrian Park zip code, out on Los Gatos-Almaden Road. How did that happen? Well, usually you want the burial grounds to be a little bit out of town, right? The Los Gatos Memorial Park began in 1888 (first burials in 1890) and was initially called the Los Gatos Cemetary. By the late 1800's, Los Gatos had expanded such that the in-town graveyard was just too close, so it was decided to move folks from their final resting place to a "more final resting place" out in the country. (It has no website, amazingly, but you can see great photos of this park by visiting an "unofficial" site at www.LGMP.com.)
Where was this old cemetery? It was located at the corner of Highway 9 and North Santa Cruz Avenue and bordered roughly by Village Lane and the old train tracks. (The land for the train is now the long parking lot parallel to University Avenue and North S. Cruz Avenue. As an aside, North Santa Cruz Avenue was called Cemetery Lane easy of Hwy 9 then!)
It should be noted, too, that not only were there people laid to rest at this location, but it's also possible that someone was killed there in 1906 when an interurban trolly car jumped its tracks and crashed at the same location - approximately where Double D's stands today.
The town's leaders tried to move all the bodies, really they did. From 1890 through 1924, they did a relocation of the town's dead to the new country location. But some family members could not be located to obtain permission to move their deceased loved ones. After the bodies were moved (or most of them), the land was converted to the Hunt Brothers Cannery and housing for cannery workers for awhile. Today it's a bustling part of our downtown and houses many shops and some restaurants, the most visible of which is Double Ds. Is it haunted? You'd be surprised if I said no. Several of the businesses there do, indeed, have paranormal experiences and it appears that some of the folks initially buried there still consider this their home. Yes, it's haunted. Very haunted.
Blog entry by Mary Pope-Handy,
Los Gatos Enthusiast,
Los Gatos & Silicon Valley (San Jose area) Residential Real Estate Specialist and
Realtor, CRS, ABR, SRES, ASP, CNHS, RECS, E-Pro,
Intero Real Estate Services, 518 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos, CA 95030
www.PopeHandy.com
Do not use without permission, please.
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The statistics from February have been crunched now, and we're finding that the Silicon Valley real estate market is strengthening. Here are the links, if you'd like to review the data yourself:
The Real Estate Report (web based, interactive, clickable links)
The Real Estate Report (printable PDF file)
Interestingly, San Jose is not doing as well as much of the valley, apparently because the entry level housing is so out of whack with incomes that it is difficult for folks to get a toe in the door.
The California Association of Realtors reports that the most expensive median home sales price in the state for January 2007 is none other than our own Los Gatos, beating out the usual suspects of Santa Barbara, Laguna Nigel, etc. (of course they were also on the list of the 10 most expensive cities for January 2007). What does this tell us? Most of all, that we live in a very highly desireable area - and even when the housing market scares folks a little, they are still willing to risk it in buying here.
I think something else is going on, too. There's an old adage that really, really applies to successfully selling a home in today's real estate market: Time vs. Money. I think our sellers in Los Gatos are pretty wise overall. Most of them read up on the market and they understand that buyers now want "turnkey" homes, not fixers. So rather than put a house on the market that needs work, most of them are painting, scrubbing, planting, inspecting, and preparing their homes well in advance of selling them. And it's working. The nice homes are the ones that the buyers want, and they go fairly fast. The homes that are selling are both priced appropriately and they are put on the market in great shape.
So instead of marketing a half-ready home, and then playing catchup with the condition and the price, sellers in Los Gatos who sell (and not just list) their homes are doing the work upfront. They put in the time and effort, and in return, they get a faster sale at a higher price. They understand that "time vs. money" really applies today more than in any other market we've had in recent history.
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