LOS GATOS — A century ago, the heir to a vast San Francisco mining fortune built a 50-room mansion in the hills just south of Los Gatos, with a huge Roman-style swimming pool, a palatial library, horse stables and 43 full-time gardeners who grew prize-winning dahlias, lilies and roses.
From the 1930s until the late 1960s, Jesuit priests in-training studied the Bible and meditated there, and one occasional visitor was a young man based a mile away at a nearby novitiate, future California Gov. Jerry Brown.
Now, after decades of bureaucratic delays and environmental battles, plans are finally moving forward to restore and open to the public the 1,432-acre expanse of redwood forests, grassy meadows and oak woodlands on Silicon Valley’s doorstep.
The property, known as the Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve, sits in the hills across from Lexington Reservoir just south of Los Gatos. The public owns it. But its gates are padlocked. Thousands of motorists zoom along Highway 17 every day past its wooded hills, oblivious to its rich history.
Last week, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, a public agency based in Los Altos that has owned the property since 1999, released a draft environmental impact report outlining its future. A meeting for public input is set for Wednesday night at the district’s headquarters.
The plan calls for opening the landscape in three stages, starting in 2019, to hikers, horse riders and eventually mountain bicyclists. Most of the now dilapidated dozen or so remaining buildings from Alma College, which was operated there by the Jesuit Order from 1934 to 1969, will be demolished, except for the chapel and library. Horse stables dating back to 1916 will undergo a major renovation.
“It will be a really close-in opportunity for people in Silicon Valley to visit the redwoods,” said Steve Abbors, general manager of the open space district. “It’s going to provide some wonderful hikes and wonderful views in a place that really hasn’t been open to the public before.”
Total cost for the plan: $35 million over 20 years.
The property is home to mountain lions, black-tailed deer, coyotes, bobcats, song sparrows, mallard ducks, bullfrogs and dozens of other species.
Starting in the 1850s, the hilly landscape was logged and home to a sawmill. Then after a number of owners, it was purchased in 1906, by Dr. Harry Tevis, the son of a mining mogul. His father was Lloyd Tevis, a Kentucky banker who came to California in the Gold Rush, made a fortune buying and selling real estate, eventually becoming president of Wells Fargo and co-owner of the Anaconda Copper Mine in Montana and the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota.
When the younger Tevis died in 1931, the property was purchased amid the Depression for just $85,000 by the Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit order that had operated a center in the Los Gatos hills nearby since 1886. The Jesuits converted many of the buildings into classrooms, dormitories and other features, calling it Alma College.
Brown, who entered Sacred Heart at age 18 in 1956, said this week that although he studied at the novitiate for three years before leaving to enroll at UC Berkeley, he visited Alma College several times and found it “very beautiful.” Students were required to study 10 years at the novitiate, which now is a retirement home for Jesuit priests called Sacred Heart Center, before they were allowed to move to Alma College, he noted.
“The Jesuits should have never sold it,” he said.
But the Jesuits closed Alma College and moved to Berkeley in 1969. They sold the property in 1989 to Stanley Ho, a Hong Kong casino billionaire who hoped to build luxury homes there. The property sat quietly until Los Gatos developer Pete Denevi applied to build a golf course on the site. But he was turned down in 1996 by Santa Clara County supervisors after environmentalists mounted a fierce challenge, saying the course would harm the rural character of the area.
Finally in 1999, after the land had passed to an Oregon owner, the Arlie Land and Cattle Company, the open space district and Peninsula Open Space Trust, an environmental group, bought nearly 1,100 acres of it for $25 million.
Abbors said the open space district didn’t have the money to remove the buildings and build trails. After voters approved a $300 million bond for the district in 2014, the cash was finally available.
“It really has a lot of major challenges,” he said. “But we’re going to work as rapidly as we can so we can get these things online as quickly as possible.”
One point of controversy: Mountain bikers won’t be allowed on the property until at least 2020 and possibly as late as 2026. That’s when a multi-use trail will be built as part of Phase 2 of the 20-year plan. Until then, the district plans to install signs, bridges, culverts and a parking lot off Bear Creek Road, and turn old logging roads into trails, demolish the now wrecked, and grafitti-covered Alma College buildings (the Tevis mansion burned down in 1971), and remove old water pipes, tanks and other debris.
“We’re not really that excited about being in Phase 2, but it’s still, I think, a step forward,” said Sean McKenna, president of Silicon Valley Mountain Bikers, a group that sought access to the property.
Originally the district board denied mountain bikers, noting that 72 horses are boarded at the Bear Creek Stables, a business on the property that pays monthly rent to the district.
“There are a lot of kids learning to ride horses there,” Abbors said, “and some of the folks in the equestrian community were concerned.”
Eventually the board compromised, and will allow limited bicycle access after other trails are opened starting in 2019 to hikers and horse riders. Already, families who board horses at the stables and people who obtain special permits from the district are allowed to ride horses on the property.
“We’re at a very unique moment in time,” said Jenny Whitman, assistant manager at the stables, and a docent on the property. “We’re not going to get these opportunities every day. We dodged a bullet a few years ago, when the property almost got developed. Now it’s pretty exciting.”
