I was recently in one of the shops on Santa Cruz Avenue, it was a dress shop and I was with a lady friend and kind of bored. I hadn’t been in this shop before so, not interested in any of the clothes, way too expensive for my budget, I started just glancing around and noticed the trussing up above our heads. The usual drop ceilings we find all over the place weren’t used here and the big beams holding up the roof were clearly visible. Not that I haven’t seen lots roof beams before, the thing that caught my attention on this occasion is how the partition wall that separated this shop from several of the others in this big parent building would have required a healthy lot of work when hanging the sheet rock in the thick of all these beams. I stepped out the door and backed up to the curb and took in the building overall. I tried to recall what this had been back in the 60s or 1970s. Was the building partitioned back then or was it some big department store? I really couldn't remember. But it intrigued me and I look up and down the street, realizing that so many of these little shops had come and gone, sometimes an individual building might have two shops inside it, sometimes three or even four.
All of a sudden I was looking at the storefronts on Santa Cruz Avenue in a whole different way. Now I was looking at buildings, not shops. For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been looking up at the ceilings and finding that there are many more shops without the drop ceilings, revealing a little bit of Los Gatos history in a whole new way. Following are some of my discoveries and observations:
(Click here to read the conclusion and view the photos)