Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Council should debate Buffalo Trading Co. building's future in real small-town fashion

By Kathy Morgan

A sincere thank-you to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times for its editorial support of my hope that the Buffalo Trading Co. building on Main Street be saved. What is important to remember from our past is not always what is glamorous, elaborate, a relic of wealth, influence and high fashion.

Sometimes important reminders of our past are unpretentious, unvarnished, useful, shored up and altered with time (like most of us). Such a reminder is the Buffalo Trading Co. building, the basic structure of which has been a store on Main Street since the 1880s.

I regret the problems the Historic Preservation Committee's vote has caused for developer Dave Flick, an intelligent and skillful builder who has done good work in this town. He has already offered to restore the familiar old Los Gatos Soda Works building and acknowledged that he is obliged to save the historically designated Marriotti stone wall and its fine workmanship. Both are part of his Main Street-College Avenue project on the historic property, which includes the Buffalo Trading Co. building.

Yet I felt that to allow the immediate demolition of the Buffalo building would not only destroy a genuinely historic part of our town, but would also be premature.

This is the type of issue that the people of Los Gatos deserve to know about before it is a fait accompli. The fate of this building is one of those town issues which I will look forward to seeing letters-to-the-editor about and hearing public comment about. It is an issue which the Planning Commission and (if the project is appealed) the Town Council should take residents' testimony about in their public hearings and weigh in their deliberations. (I only wish such public debates had been part of the decisions to tear down the old City Hall or the Lyndon Hotel before they vanished from us.)

What we all think about the destruction of the Buffalo building--whether it is to save this piece of our real past or get rid of this old eyesore--should be debated in this town in a way that I have come to treasure, in a way that will be eccentric, exaggerated, articulate, thoughtful, hilarious, most significant, messy, involved and indicative of one of the last true bastions of small-town democracy, Los Gatos.

Let us know what you think.

Kathy Morgan is a founding member of the Los Gatos Historic Preservation Committee and is serving her fourth term on the Los Gatos Planning Commission.