The neighborhood of Cherry Orchard in Sunnyvale is among the most impressive of all communities in the far west San Jose region. Many people consider Cherry Orchard to be one of the safest communities in the entire United States, with its mother community of Sunnyvale ranking in the top five safest cities since 1966, according to FBI crime reports. Most recently, Sunnyvale was ranked as the seventh safest city in the United States by Forbes Magazine. Ironically, Cherry Orchard has a poor safety portrayal on television, primarily due to shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which show it filled with supernatural crime.
Although Cherry Orchard is a very small community consisting of just a few streets in Sunnyvale, a number of its residents and stores are quite famous. Rooster T Feathers, a comedy club on the northern end of Cherry Orchard, is where the very first Pong arcade game was installed in 1972.
Toys R Us, also on the northern end of the community, is rumored to be haunted by a ghost named Johnny Johnson; the ghost was so named by psychic Sylvia Browne on the 1978 television show, That’s Incredible. The ghost myth was further exacerbated on a 1991 episode of Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories.
Cherry Orchard is bordered on the west by two major parks, the Sunnyvale Municipal Tennis Center and Las Palmas Park. It is bordered on the north by South Mathilda Avenue, the east by Sunnyvale Saratoga Road, and the south by Crawford Drive. Despite its extremely small size, only 300 residents live there, making it quite heavily populated by Sunnyvale standards. The community is culturally diverse, and skews toward the upper middle class economically.