On a recent visit to the Valley Fair Cheesecake Factory, the ghost of photographer Arnold Del Carlo arrived and transformed the whole scene into Stickney’s, as it was 60 years ago.
At the time, Stevens Creek Plaza was a separate mall anchored by the largest Emporium department store between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Stickney’s, a carnivore’s paradise, was next door, right where Cheesecake Factory is now. Decades later the plaza merged with nearby Valley Fair into one gargantuan complex.
Del Carlo was far ahead of his time. With more than a thousand photos, he successfully captured the valley’s transformation from orchards to a vast suburban expanse, before today’s tech industry even existed.
This is not nostalgia. I don’t miss the old Valley Fair or the old Stevens Creek Plaza. I certainly don’t miss Stickney’s, where the servers probably had names like Ethel and Mildred.
What I do lament are the days when suburban architecture and the stories behind the buildings still mattered to people, if such days even existed at all. For example, the architectural firm Welton Beckett & Associates designed the Emporium at Stevens Creek Plaza. At the time, Beckett had already given us the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles, the Nile Hilton in Cairo and the Havana Hilton in Cuba, plus dozens of sturdy west-coast civic structures, airports, hotels and sports complexes that still stand today.
“That remaining block of concrete and glass actually has an architectural pedigree,” said Heather David, San Jose’s pre-eminent historian of mid-century buildings. David used some of Del Carlo’s photos in her book, Mid-Century by the Bay.
One would never know any of this while perusing the Hugo Boss shirts or the floor-to-ceiling display of Cuisinarts in the Macy’s Men’s and Home Store at Valley Fair, which has now occupied the former Emporium building for decades. The skinny hipsters dropping a hundred bucks for Buffalo David Bitton jeans certainly aren’t aware of the history.
At the opposite end of Valley Fair, the Macy’s Women’s & Children’s store is the original 1956 Macy’s building, although it likewise looks quite a bit different. That one was designed by John Savage Bolles and Associates, the same people who designed Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the IBM San Jose Campus and Paul Masson Champagne Cellars in Saratoga. All of these folks were the real deal.
“Two older buildings by two of the most prestigious architectural firms of the time anchoring an enclosed mall, almost defiant in their existence,” said David. “Gives me chills.”
Which brings us right back to Arnold Del Carlo, universally known as “Del” when he was alive. For decades, Del Carlo captured mid-century modern buildings, facades and interiors in ways unlike anyone else in San Jose before or since. In addition to shopping centers, he depicted fast food joints, grocery stores, bank facades and steakhouses.
He also flew through the skies in a private plane and somehow managed to snap aerial shots of subdivisions in the ’60s, but in ways that made the landscape almost endearing. He was an absolute genius at finding beauty in the mundane, precisely why his work still resonates and inspires this column over and over.
Del Carlo was passionate about everything, Heather David once told me. Framing was essential to getting the best photograph, she said, and Del Carlo could transform utterly commonplace buildings into architectural masterpieces just by the way he positioned his camera.
“He made coffee shops, gas stations and bowling alleys sexy,” David said.
When the ghost of Del Carlo met me at Cheesecake Factory, I immediately called Heather David and thanked her. No one has done more to keep Del Carlo’s legacy alive than she has.
That’s the lesson here. A wise man, Arnold Del Carlo, planted a tree whose shade he might never witness. We can once again see what the valley looked like 60 years ago. This is exactly why contemporary photography is important. Shoot pictures. Capture scenes. Do it for the future generations that will need to see your work, or read your work.
So this is not about nostalgia. Not at all. I looked around the Cheesecake Factory for people named Ethel and Mildred, but they were nowhere to be found.
