In its nearly 100 years of existence, the Gaslighter Theater in Campbell has gone from holding sharecropper’s cash as a bank in the 1920s and showing movies during World War II to being a small-stage theater for vaudeville acts and an all-ages rock venue as recently as 2006. At that time, the white marble landmark, with thick columns bracketing the entrance, was closed temporarily so it could be refashioned as a lounge. Five and a half years later, the Gaslighter remains dark. But there’s hope the theater could be resurrected in coming months if it can overcome the kind of obstacles that frequently crop up in small town development battles.
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The gifts have been unwrapped, the stockings unstuffed and the ham scarfed down. The holidays are over, minus the one that always seems to elude planning—New Year’s Eve.
Good ideas can come from anywhere. Even 6-year-old girls. Mountain View resident Liz Snyder was enjoying a visit to the park with her daughter, Helen Liles. A popsicle vendor walked by, and Helen pleaded for a treat. Snyder said no because of the artificial and highly processed ingredients found in popsicles and ice cream. “I gave her a lecture for the umpteenth time,” she recalls.
With the benefit of hindsight and digestion, here are some of the best things I ate in the year that was.
Scrambled or fried? Hashbrowns or home fries? Wheat or white? Important decisions await you at breakfast. Here are five restaurants that will get your day started right.
A drink and a drag off a cigarette were once a classic fixture of American nightlife. But in the mid-‘90s, new laws made smoking illegal in California bars and other public places, and to light up a cigarette meant placing a coaster on a pint and stepping out the door. Increasingly, cities around the Bay Area now are considering taking the law much further than that. Multiple municipalities in the South Bay are putting forth proposals to make smoking in public and, in some cases, inside one’s home, illegal.
The bar is really more of a lounge. There are no bar stools yet, just a pair of comfy gray chenille couches between the bar and the reception desk. Additional seating will come next year, as well as a small menu. But the drinks are sublime.
It’s still a tough climate to open a new restaurant in San Jose, but that didn’t stop a handful of notable newcomers from opening their doors.
As proof that the Grinch is not just some imaginary Dr. Seuss character, see Exhibit A: Sandra Lizbeth Contreras-Velazquez. Just a week before Christmas, San Jose police announced that in the lead-up to the holiday season, Contreras-Velazquez was allegedly stealing the jewelry of others. But not just anyone with a gold chain. Contreras-Velazquez is suspected of tricking children into giving away their jewelry so she could sell it for profit.
The San Jose Police department cracked down on the city’s largest and most organized graffiti tagging crew this week, announcing the arrests of four suspected members of the HYSU tagging crew. HYSU, which stands for “Have You Seen Us,” is reportedly responsible for over 50 percent of the graffiti around San Jose, and the group recently garnered the attention of the SJPD and other city officials for their “bombing runs,” which were increasing in frequency and intensity.
