OMVNA Newsletter

July 2003
Volume 15, Number 5

From the Chair: If You Care About the Urban Forest

Profile of an Involved Neighbor

OMVNA Summer General Meeting

The Downtown Beat

College Planning Seminar Offered

Love Among the Stacks

From the Chair: If You Care About the Urban Forest
By Ronit Bryant

If you care about the urban forest and native vegetation, here’s how you can have some direct impact on what happens in Mountain View: come to the meetings of the Parks and Recreation Commission (PRC). The PRC usually meets in the Community Room at the Library, the second Wednesday of the month, at 7 pm.

At its upcoming meeting (on July 23 this time, 7 pm, at the Rengstroff Community Center), the PRC will begin work on choosing a new street tree for Castro Street — City Council has accepted the PRC’s recommendation to reconsider the current choice (Idaho locust), which has proven disappointing (take a good look at the trees on Castro and see for yourself).

The first step will be to define criteria for choosing a street tree for Castro. If you have suggestions, recommendations, advice (a native tree that you recommend, a streetscape that you find particularly attractive, a species that would benefit our downtown), come to the PRC meeting and share your knowledge and opinions with the Commission; you can also email the Commissioners or contact them by phone (the information is available on the City’s website). PRC agendas are available the Friday before the Wednesday meeting.

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Profile of an Involved Neighbor
By Ronit Bryant

Which one of these describes you best? You’ve been in the neighborhood forever and you feel a strong sense of belonging to it. You’ve been around for quite some time and there’s some stuff in the neighborhood that you wish would finally get done. You’ve finally got some time on your hands (newly retired, newly downsized, or maybe the kids are finally showing some signs of being able to entertain themselves for a couple of minutes) and you want to get involved. You’re new to the neighborhood and you’d like to get to know more neighbors.

Whichever of these fits you, the answer is: Become involved in the neighborhood association. We are in the process of putting together a slate of officers for 2003-2004 (to be voted on at our Fall General Meeting). The Nominating Committee consists of Chair Bruce Karney, former chair of OMVNA, Ronit Bryant, current chair of OMVNA, and Velva Rowell, co-editor of the newsletter.

As an officer and member of the OMVNA Board, you would attend the OMVNA Steering Committee’s monthly meeting; for the rest, you can choose your own level of involvement. Interested? Contact Bruce at 964-3567.

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OMVNA Summer General Meeting
Saturday, July 19, 2003
11:30 am Mercy-Bush Park

Appreciating Your Early 20th Century Neighborhood

11:30 am: Meet at Mercy-Bush Park for a walking tour of our neighborhood, led by Jane Powell, former Old Mountain View resident and well-known author of a series of books on bungalows. (Jane’s books will be available at the meeting.)

1 pm: Back to Mercy-Bush Park. Light lunch provided by OMVNA; introduction of OMVNA’s new "old house" web pages, designed to help restore heritage homes and landscaping; brief business meeting.

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The Downtown Beat
By Julie Lovins

While we hear that some downtown businesses are struggling in the current unfavorable economy, it is a good sign that those who lose are rapidly being replaced by new ventures. Thus, while we recently lost three restaurants, two of the sites (Florentine, Babbo) are under renovation and will soon have new occupants. The dramatic Vivaca space is still available. And we are still waiting for the opening of Miyake Sushi, on the diagonally opposite corner of Castro and California.

Down the street at 285 Castro, La Petite Chaise has opened with unusually attractive window displays fronting a fascinating array of antique house-and-garden items. The wares are provided by a co-op of a dozen dealers, an attractive way to do this kind of retail.

Additional interesting shops, as well as the "basic goods and services" desired by both neighborhood residents and downtown workers, may result from a recent City-sponsored "retail broker tour" that I tagged along on. There were a lot of brokers getting copious information, including first-hand promotion by local businesspeople. The for-lease spaces they saw are suitable for a wide variety of businesses.

Some of the currently available retail space is at or near 698 W. Dana, which some old timers remember as Knight's Pharmacy. A new owner has handsomely upgraded the complex. In the Neighborhood Watch Department, though, we have noticed that in preparation for resurfacing the parking lot, around the end of June, the landmark Knight's Pharmacy sign vanished. Does anyone know to where? Is anyone interested in putting in dibs for any other old signs around town that might vanish forever if no one speaks up about wanting them? Do we need a formal way of doing this?

In the coming-soon category, the design phase of a second parking structure (to be built on the public parking lot at California and Bryant) has finally passed the City Council. They have mandated that it "must not look like a parking structure". It will have 20,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, with 468 parking spaces on levels above that. There is talk of finally being able to attract a mid-size grocery store "or a pharmacy". I think we can do both!

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College Planning Seminar Offered
By Ken Rosenberg, Mercy Street Resident/ Financial Advisor, Morgan Stanley

Are you preparing for the expense of your child’s college education?

As a resident of Old Mountain View, and a frequent visitor to our parks (especially Mercy-Bush Park), I can’t help but notice that we are a community literally swarming with children. Many of us have the same dreams for our kids: good health, good friends, and someday, a good college education.

If you are a parent who believes it is your responsibility to pay (or to help pay) for your kid’s college education, be prepared for sticker shock. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (nces.ed.gov) the last 3 years saw the cost of public colleges rise 25% and private colleges rise 18%. By the time today’s newborns set out for college, it could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000! California’s budget crisis is making our revered UC and Cal State system raise tuition for the next academic year.

Investing for a child’s education may be easier than you thought. The introduction of a tax qualified savings vehicle, called 529 (taken from its section of the Internal Revenue Code) offers many features parents and grandparents might find compelling. For starters, earnings grow tax deferred similar to an IRA. If the money is used for higher education, it will be federally tax-free upon withdrawal. As a California resident, it is state tax-free as well.

There are many other features of the 529 plans that investors will find compelling, especially in comparison to other traditional college saving plans. Some features include the ability to transfer the funds from one family member to another, parental control of the funds, the ability to choose almost any college in the US, the ability to choose from a variety of investment alternatives and no income restrictions.

If you’d like to learn more about how a 529 plan can help you save for your children’s college education, please contact me at 408-861-2037 or ken.rosenberg@morganstanley.com or attend a free seminar on this subject (hosted by me) at Mountain View City Hall on August 6th at 6:00 p.m. RSVPs are required because seating is limited. Refreshments will be provided.

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Love Among the Stacks
By Shelly King

In college I worked in the stacks, those towering shelves of books in the library that, as I found out, held more than just the answers to Dr. Drake's midterm exam. Three nights a week, I worked the 7:00-11:00 shift, shelving books. Every night shift without fail I'd come across a pair of lovers in one form of embrace or another. Some times it was simply leaning into each other against a wall while reading or catching a nap and sometimes it was heavy necking among the graduate students' kiosks. One couple’s encounter was so well broadcast across the floor that, when they finally emerged, they were greeted with applause from those studying near by.

The stacks comprised a labyrinth of romantic nestlings, like the forest of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the end of a night wondering the stacks, I was higgly-piggly with romantic notions of my own, much to the delight of my boyfriend who was always waiting outside to walk me back to my dorm room at that late hour. Years after we broke up, he told me those walks were the best part of our relationship.

So, for me, the most romantic place in Mountain View is the maze of stacks at the Book Buyers used bookstore on Castro near Dana. Yes, the Mountain View Library is lovely, but the stacks there are too bright and open. They are too organized so that locating what you think you want is much too easy. The romance of Book Buyers is in the claustrophobic narrowness of the aisles of shelves that only hint at what they might hold. It’s the closeness of those stacks that might cause someone to brush against another someone to pass by or to reach around for a copy of Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus that has caught the eye.

Books, Inc. offers us MVers our own well-lit place for books and a café above to observe the social mingles below. But the books there are all virginally new and still smelling of the printers. They are like people without pasts, without tales to tell. The books at Book Buyers have been through many hands and will move on to others. These books smell of human touch and all its possibilities.

As the daylight lingers in the evenings now, I walk down to Book Buyers more and more. The store brims with activity in the late hours, the methodical lingering movement of those looking for what they don't yet know they need. How remarkable it would be to fall instantly in love with someone there for his extraordinary taste in literature or perhaps his compulsive need to buy one of those outdated calendars simply because he likes the pictures.

I know the perfect place to meet the one who would send my heart all a-flutter. It’s in the hardback fiction section, among the authors whose last names start with M, a promising letter that happens to be tucked away in a discreet corner in the back of the store. Our eyes would meet over the top of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I happen to be perusing. I'd make a comment about the copy of The Sun Also Rises in his hand. Getting ready for a trip to Paris he'd say. I'd mention my book's inscription on the title page, "To Laura, Happy Birthday, Love Forever, Robert" and we'd have a laugh over our melodramatic speculations on what crime Robert could have committed to send his birthday gift to the used bookstore. And then it would all begin.

But, alas, I have yet to find love among the stacks at Book Buyers. The best I've managed is a harmless flirtation with a man well into his sixties. After leisurely browsing down the same aisle of books, he turned to me and said laughingly, "I'm not following you, honestly." I laughed back and said, "How disappointing, I haven't had a man follow me around all night. I thought my luck was changing." And with the graciousness seemingly lost in my generation, he went to great jovial lengths to tell me what a tragedy that was.

My lack of romantic encounters at Book Buyers has not discouraged me. Maybe it’s because I’m in love with the store itself, with its handled wares and their untold tales of wounded hearts. Maybe it’s because I just like wondering about the people who owned all those books before. Maybe it’s because the people whose paths I cross are like the books there, a bit worn around the edges and waiting for the right person to open them up and take them home.

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The OMVNA Newsletter
is published by a volunteer editorial committee & distributed to some 2400 homes and businesses by volunteers.

To get in touch with us:

• Write to P.O.Box 391328, Mtn. View, CA 94039
• E-mail the editor editor@omvna.org
• Find us on the Web at http://www.omvna.org/index.html

The opinions printed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the OMVNA Steering Committee.