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I’ve lived a stone’s throw from Castro Street for nearly a decade and a half. My family and I have seen businesses come and go. My daughters continue to mourn Amici’s relocation across town. My husband and I frequently speculate about why the New China Delight space has remained vacant for well over a decade. We tell new neighbors about the odd spectacle of the Jehning Family Lock Museum that once sat in the Ames Building. We compare notes about spotted “for lease” signs on vacant storefronts. We scrutinize development notices and peer into windows to gauge progress toward new restaurant or shop openings.
We wondered how Castro Street restaurants would survive after tech workers began to work from home and marveled at how some Castro Street businesses reinvented themselves during the pandemic. Ava’s delivered our groceries in Starship robots. St. Stephen’s Green sold flour and other staples to consumers.
Mountain View’s downtown looks better these days, although vacancies persist, turnover rates remain high and astronomical rents prevent the quirky businesses of the past from opening up shop. We love Castro Street’s permanent pedestrian walkway and the addition of miniature golf, ping pong, bean bag toss and other games to the main drag.
And yet, as residents, we are generally mere spectators to these efforts to revitalize downtown.
Mountain View’s first Makers Market last month offered a space for residents to be part of the city’s downtown revitalization strategy. For this pilot series, the city of Mountain View’s Economic Development Department curated a group of over 50 vendors to sell their wares on the 300 block of Castro Street over four Friday afternoons and evenings. The goal was twofold: to draw people downtown and to support local makers. The city publicized the vendor opportunity widely and there was no tabling fee. As a result, the selected vendors reflected the community. Half were from Mountain View and all were from the South Bay.
Those artists include me. Along with the majority of vendors, I had never tabled at a craft fair.
As a hobby, I make zines — those homemade, photocopied pamphlets familiar to punks, Gen Xers and other lost souls. My zines often capture community members’ reflections on history, memory and community, weaving oral histories around historical documents. Some of my zines are humorous, rewriting speeches, headlines, announcements, advertisements and other artifacts of the past for the contemporary moment. My zines are creative, but they are hardly artistic.
And yet, the city’s Makers Market found a place for me. The Economic Development Department offered training sessions for people new to selling their work: managing electronic payments, obtaining a seller’s permit, displaying goods and reporting taxes. Vendors shared tips on a city-organized text messaging group: where to rent a tent, how to set up an eye-catching display, how to counter the wind, what kind of lights to purchase and where to get banners printed.
The community extended to the market itself. At my zine table, passersby could make their own mini-zines. Two Los Altos High School students made their zine into a cookie jar and invited people walking by to add pages depicting imagined cookies. A talented fifth grade comic book artist hosting a nearby stand drew a catnip cookie that also resembled a cat. One person added a rainbow cookie. Someone else drew a cookie with a honeydew shell and an edible mermaid-like tail with sparkles.
I had conversations with members of the community whom I otherwise wouldn’t have met. A second grade girl whose family was new to Mountain View made a zine about pink cats while her mom and I chatted and realized that she was attending Landels Elementary School with my younger daughter. A young boy worked on his zine for 45 minutes while I talked with his parents. A Graham Middle School student used paper to construct flaps and pockets for his zine and narrated what he had created to me. Some people took pictures of the instructions for folding their own mini-zine so that they could make one at home.
I am not an economic development expert. I can’t tell you how much money the first Makers Market brought downtown or whether the event stimulated the development of new small businesses. But I can say that after nearly 15 years of fretting over vacancies, closures and rising rents downtown, I finally feel that I can offer something to help. That something? Building community.
Rachel Burstein is a professional education researcher and writer and an amateur zinemaker. She lives with her family in Old Mountain View.
Interested in attending an upcoming Makers Market? More are scheduled for 3-8 p.m. Oct. 23, Nov. 20 and Dec. 18 on the 300 block of Castro Street.
