The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Murphy Avenue wasn't always the friendly place it is today.

Sunnyvale's Murphy Avenue: riches to rags to riches again

By Natasha Collins and Bianca Dahl

Murphy Avenue bustles these days with shops, pubs and restaurants. Diners eat at sidewalk cafes, sip cappuccinos at coffee bars and listen and dance to live music in renovated historic buildings.

In fact, downtown appears to be in the midst of a second heyday, with a near-zero vacacancy rate and respectable crowds of patrons visiting noon and night.

But it wasn't always so. Murphy Avenue is now at the tail end of a riches-to-rags-to-riches story, having spun 180 degrees from the community eyesore it once was.

In earlier days--back in the 1920s-1950s--Murphy Avenue was Sunnyvale's hub, filled with taverns, bakeries, banks, hardware stores and canneries. It was where everyone came to do their shopping.

But in the 1960s, soon after the Taaffe Street shopping center was built, people seemed to stop coming to Murphy Avenue, and several stores were forced to close. As the electrical stores and other specialty shops went out of business, barrooms, pornographic film stores and adult bookstores took their place. The building that now houses the Palace nightclub and restaurant was once the Sunnyvale Cinema, which featured X-rated movies, said David Vossbrink, Sunnyvale's community relations officer.

The street was named after the Murphy family, who owned most of the land on which Sunnyvale is now built. The road extended from El Camino Real to Evelyn Avenue when it was first constructed, but in 1979 Towne Center Mall was built and split the road in two.

"I can remember when crime was really bad down there," said Lt. Tim Davis, who has worked for the department of public safety for 20 years. "It was all bars that catered to a rough crowd."

The buildings were rundown and had not been maintained for years, he said.

"It was not the kind of place that people would want to go shopping or spend the evening, unless they were looking for some kind of trouble," Davis said.

Councilman Gil Gun told the citizens in 1976 that he "would no longer tolerate the empty stores and sex shops of downtown."

The buildings on Murphy Avenue were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s and had not been renovated since. Shop owners had simply added onto their stores or plastered over cracks and structures to keep the buildings standing, according to records at the historical society.

The value of all the downtown buildings in 1976 was a little more than $2.5 million, while the land itself was worth more than $12.5 million. It was for this reason that the council looked into tearing down the stores and rebuilding in the 1980s.

"At that time the council was contemplating extending the redevelopment to replace Murphy. There was a growing sense of the need to preserve the city's heritage," Vossbrink said.

The council soon learned that it would cost $13 million less to renovate the shops than to tear them down, and $3 million was allocated to restoring the area. In 1981 Murphy Avenue was deemed a historic district, which allowed the City Council greater control over the block's future.

The first step in the city's process of renovating Murphy was to get rid of the pornography shops and taverns, as well as revamping the buildings.

"It was truly an eyesore, so the city tried to make it a much more attractive spot to preserve its historical beauty," said Suzi Blackman, director of the Sunnyvale Chamber of Commerce.

Once the city began to restore the area, private entrepreneurs started to invest money in the street's renovation. Some examples of private funds being used to refurbish buildings are the redevelopment of the Palace nightclub and the historic Del Monte Building.

"Murphy Avenue today is mostly the result of private business initiative and investment. Risk money, which has been invested over the last five years, has really made a difference in the redevelopment," Vossbrink said.

Today Murphy Avenue is filled with restaurants and shops, as well as a few pubs and nightclubs. On weekend nights the street is filled with residents walking to and from shops or sitting at tables eating a meal, Blackman said.

"People like to come down here now and spend time together," Davis said. "Public Safety officers come down here all the time, when they are working and with their families, to eat and shop. Everyone likes to come downtown now."

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, October 8, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.