“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”—Margaret J. Wheatley
While taking my Model 3 to the Tesla Service Center in Sunnyvale, I spotted this sprawling piece of property with a large peanut-shaped pond, waterfalls, and vertical fountains shooting water towards the sky in the backdrop. The frontage was covered with manicured lawns and an old Coastal Live Oak Tree in the front, with gaggles of geese, seagulls, and ducks resting in the shade provided by its canopy. It turned out to be the Sunnyvale Community Center Park. After getting a loaner from Tesla I decided to circle back to see what else there was to see. I parked and entered on the corner of Remington Avenue and Michelangelo Road.
I soon discovered this was not your usual run-of-the-mill community center. It is more a full service recreational campus with a creative arts center, indoor sports and general recreation buildings, a senior center, and a historical museum. The Center is spread out around an enormous peanut-shaped pond and a beautiful fruit orchard, reminiscent of the time before the advent of what would become Silicon Valley. My mother’s Sicilian-born first cousin John Trina retired to the the valley for health reasons after living in the harsh winters in Ohio. The Performing Arts Center comes equipped with a 200-seat Sunnyvale Theatre and dance studio, fully rigged with lighted stage that accommodates plants, recitals and concerts. There is also a good sized park in the back. There is plenty of space to play frisbee, badminton, and other games. Some people come to picnic, read, walk their dogs, do yoga, or simply sit, and contemplate on the benches or one of many stone structures around the pond. Heck, you can even get married here.
I spent most of my time visiting the Creative Arts Center which offers art classes, open painting and pottery studios for young and old alike. I also visited the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum which is a replica of the home of one of Santa Clara Valley’s original settlers, Martin Murphy Jr. It includes a permanent display depicting the area from its agricultural heyday to today’s bustling hight tech metropolis it is today. The hardest thing about writing this post was editing the photos I took, which were abundant, beginning with the stainless-steel sculpture by Dan Dykes called “Matrix,” created in 1984, and metallic sculpture by John Battenberg, called "Murphy Street Scene,” created on my day of my birth, August 26, to name a few. The sculpture is a salute to the workers and natives of the Sunnyvale area, both past and present. Several of the figures represent the orchard workers before the transformation to a high tech center.
It was fun capturing the images of people resting near the pond taking it all in and I enjoyed stopping to play the oversized xylophones next to the Creative Arts Center to “ring” in the rest of my day.
