Cuesta Park

Framed by Grant Road, Cuesta Drive, Castro Street and East El Camino Real, Cuesta Park is a quiet, middle-of-the-road Mountain View community. It has a flat, mildly attractive outer appearance and tends to be dominated by single family homes. For your commercial needs, Grant Park Plaza and Blossom Valley Shopping are the two closest shopping areas in the district. They combine to offer a Rite Aid, a Pizza Shop and a Walgreens while across the street you can find a couple mixed restaurants. If you head towards the southern tip of the district, you’ll come across a handful of medical based facilities and anonymous, one-story commercial buildings.

Cuesta Park’s residential terrain is fixed within middle-class suburbia. While there are a wide range of home styles, most houses afford the usual middle-class amenities: a two-car garage, a modest amount of interior living space and a decent sized front yard. These parts are pretty unglamorous. While residences are shaped as small, boxy, single-story homes, they carry little to no appeal for younger generations. In fact, many of the smaller homes do not have garages, just long, narrow driveways that feed into the sides of properties. But homes tend to be a bit nicer the further south you go. Maybe that’s why median house listings are within the $1 million range. If you’re looking to rent, there are a handful of condominiums dotting the neighborhood. They tend to look a bit more modern (or at least updated) than the selection of homes. You can find them concentrated towards Boranda Avenue. The asking price for these residences sell for around $400,000 on average.

There is nothing really too substantial about this neighborhood. For recreation, you have the one luxury of having a large, 25-acre community park which offers a lot. To name a few, it provides locals with a children’s playground, community tennis courts, picnic areas, a youth soccer field, a volleyball court, restrooms and a peaceful path for dog walkers and strollers. For young families, the neighborhood is served by the Mountain View-Whisman School District which overseas Bubb Elementary School and Graham Middle School while older students attend Mountain View High School. All schools rank above average in test scores set against the city and, as a result, garner a solid reputation amongst the local community.

Cuesta Park is really the heart of Mountain View for me. This is where you will find everything from El Camino Hospital to some of the classic older homes of Mountain View.

Let’s start with the hospital. With more than 2000 workers, El Camino Hospital is Mountain View’s third top employer behind internet giants, Symantec and Google. From its renowned Cancer Center and Heart and Vascular Institute to its nurse training program and its full complement of health care services, El Camino is certainly one of the best hospitals in the Bay Area. But its influence in Mountain View and the surrounding area extends beyond the hospital grounds. El Camino does a fair amount of community outreach offering programs like free lectures, new mother mentoring programs and its fairly well-known “Day of Dance”. These programs help integrate parts of the surrounding community with the hospital’s mission, and contribute to the general health and well-being of the Mountain View populace.

Just to the north of El Camino Hospital is Cuesta Park and its offering of recreational areas. Cuesta Park is probably the best park at the heart of Mountain View. It is a fairly large area with lots of grass for laying around reading or perhaps having a nice picnic (though I haven’t seen much of this), and there is a nice play area for kids, trails for nice walks and a soccer field.

Adjacent to Cuesta Field are the tennis courts of Mountain View Tennis—whose half dozen courts are the location for the beginning and intermediate classes that help foster the sport in Mountain View.

But the location is not just about health of the body. The Cuesta Park neighborhood is also about the health of the mind and spirit. With St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church on Cuesta Drive (my brother’s church) and St. Francis High School just to the west of El Camino Hospital you will find a fair amount of spiritual guidance here as well. When it comes to St. Francis High School, it is one of the best Catholic high schools in the Bay Area, offering a college-like atmosphere that focuses on academic rigor, character education, and also has strong athletics programs (go Lancers!). Though Mountain View hardly needs an alternative to their public schools, St. Francis is definitely the private alternative for those that want to avoid sending their kids to public schools.

North of Cuesta Drive, the Cuesta Park neighborhood is largely a residential neighborhood made up of older nicely kept Ranch homes, with some newer nicely kept condominiums on the far northern end by El Camino Real.

What does it cost to live in Cuesta Park?

This is one of those hyper stable neighborhoods where few houses come on the market at one time, but from what I’ve noticed it is a lot like many of the other highly desirable neighborhoods in Mountain View. Currently, for example there is a small 1200 foot Ranch home dating, of course, to the 50’s which will run you just shy of $1 million.

Not the most of affordable of neighborhoods, but my favorite in Mountain View.