The Historic Downtown Los Gatos Walking Tour was rather quietly established a year ago in conjunction with the Town Plaza Celebration, the grand reopening of the plaza park at the corner of Main Street and Santa Cruz Avenue. A year later, though, the tour route has been seldom traveled, and few in town are even aware that such a tour exists—enter Leadership Los Gatos.

The group, born out of the program offered through the Town of Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce, decided to take on as its project an awareness campaign for the tour that features 16 points of historic interest in an area that covers about 15 blocks of downtown.

To that end, members of the Leadership Los Gatos group will meet in the Town Plaza at 3 p.m. on Aug. 17 to lead anyone interested on a special guided tour of the circuit.

The Chamber worked with town historian Bill Wulf, author/historian Alastair Dallas and the History Museum of Los Gatos to develop the tour, an offshoot of a much longer tour created by the History Museum.

"As a class, we wanted to create a project that would allow us to exercise some of the skills that we learned," said Jenny Partridge, project leader. "The other piece was that we wanted to be consistent with the Keep Los Gatos Beautiful campaign."

"We have such a great history in town, we wanted to create a walking tour that would allow participants to appreciate the beauty of Los Gatos," she added. "When we started to do some research, we found the brochure and discovered that there already was such a tour."

So the Leadership Los Gatos crew set out to create public awareness of the tour, and it will begin that campaign Sunday when Vice Mayor Steve Glickman and Laura Bajuk, director of the History Museum, will lead the special guided tour.

The route begins at the historic La Cañada block at the corner of W. Main Street and N. Santa Cruz Avenue; points out the site of the old Lyndon Hotel; passes through the Almond Grove district and focuses on the first firehouse, the Templeton Boarding House and the John Mason House on Tait Avenue; passes by the old Mail-News Building on Bean Avenue, the Cotton Works and Los Gatos Theater on N. Santa Cruz Avenue, and, on Main Street, points out the Bank of America (originally the Bank of Italy), the First National Bank, Ford's Opera House and the Fretwell Building; passes through the old University Avenue School and past Forbes Hill; and travels down the Los Gatos Creek Trail.

That the tour exists is a credit to the History Museum of Los Gatos, with the help of Wulf and Dallas. That the tour is finally getting the attention and recognition that it deserves is a credit to the efforts of the Town of Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce's 2003 Leadership Los Gatos class.