Blue and Gold Kennel Club
Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California
Marker Inscription
This eighteen-room farmhouse was built by Nicholas Kristmas in 1924. By 1928, it had entered into an era of local infamy… The house featured two bars in the basement, one for ordinary patrons and a second which featured a ballroom for elite clientele…… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
This eighteen-room farmhouse was built by Nicholas Kristmas in 1924, and by 1928 it had gained a certain local infamy. During Prohibition it reportedly housed two basement bars — one for ordinary patrons and another with a ballroom for elite clientele. The building captures the hidden nightlife of the Prohibition era in the Santa Clara Valley.
Why it matters
As a Prohibition-era speakeasy, this house preserves the story of how Americans quietly defied the ban on alcohol in the Roaring Twenties.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1924, when Nicholas Kristmas raised this eighteen-room farmhouse, the Santa Clara Valley was still an ocean of orchards — the fabled "Valley of Heart's Delight," carpeted in prune, apricot, and cherry trees decades before silicon gave it a new name. It was farm country, prosperous and quiet, and a big farmhouse with room to spare was a sign of a family doing well off the land.
But this was also the height of Prohibition. Since 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act had made the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal across the United States. The law did not extinguish the American thirst so much as drive it underground, and a decade of forbidden drinking gave the Roaring Twenties their reckless glamour.
Rural California, with its long distances and quiet back roads, was well suited to that hidden economy. A farmhouse set off among the orchards, away from prying eyes in town, could become something other than a home after dark.
People & events
The house began as Nicholas Kristmas's ambition in 1924 — eighteen rooms is a grand statement for a valley farmhouse, and it speaks to a builder who wanted his place to matter. Within just a few years, the marker tells us, that ambition took an unexpected turn, and by 1928 the house had earned what it calls a certain local infamy.
The detail that survives is wonderfully specific: not one basement bar but two. One was for ordinary patrons — the neighbors and passers-through looking for a quiet drink. The second was something finer, a bar with its own ballroom set aside for an elite clientele. It is a small architectural fact that tells a whole social story: even in the outlaw world of the speakeasy, the old lines of class and money were carefully redrawn downstairs.
Who those elite guests were, and what exactly went on beneath the floorboards, the record leaves discreetly unsaid — as such places always intended. What endures is the shape of the operation itself, a house living a double life above and below ground.
Its place in the American story
Prohibition is one of the great American experiments in trying to legislate private behavior, and its most lasting lesson was how thoroughly ordinary people were willing to ignore a law they did not accept. The speakeasy became the symbol of that quiet mass rebellion — a place where breaking the law was social, even fashionable.
What makes a house like this valuable is that the national story of the 1920s usually gets told through big cities: Chicago's gangsters, New York's jazz clubs, the glittering nightlife of the metropolis. Places like this remind us that the same defiance played out in farm country too, in eighteen-room farmhouses among the orchards, run by local builders rather than famous mobsters.
When Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, the speakeasies mostly emptied out and returned to being what they had been. The ones we remember are the ones someone bothered to mark — small monuments to a decade when a great many Americans decided which laws they would keep.
If you visit
This is a private home, so admire it from the public way and let the neighborhood be. What you are really looking at is an ordinary-seeming house with an extraordinary hidden history — the interest is in what you now know about it, not in anything on display.
Stand back and take in the scale of the place. Eighteen rooms was a lot of house for 1924, and once you know about the two bars and the ballroom tucked below, the size starts to feel less like farmhouse pride and more like a building with plans of its own.
If you're touring the valley, this makes a fine counterweight to the tech-history stops nearby. It's a reminder that long before microchips, the Santa Clara Valley had its own secrets — and that a quiet house on a quiet road can hold a louder story than its front porch would ever admit.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Nicholas Kristmas
Themes & tags
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