San Jose

Information Service: Chamber of Commerce, Civic Auditorium, W. San Carlos and S. Market Sts. American Automobile Assn. and California State Auto Assn., 1024 The Alameda. Convention and Tourist Bureau, Civic Auditorium. Railroad Station: Southern Pacific, 56 Cahill St. Bus Stations: Union Bus Station, 25 S. Market St., for Pacific Greyhound and Peerless Stages. San Jose Travel Bureau, 44 W. San Carlos St., for Airline Bus Co. and Dollar Line. Sightseeing and Charter Service: California State Auto Assn., 1024 The Alameda. Taxis: Rates 15¢ first ½ m., 10¢ each additional ½ m. Busses: Pacific City Lines (local and to Santa Clara), 7¢. Traffic Regulations: Speed limit 25 m.p.h. Parking limit 1 hr. No all-night parking in downtown area.

Accommodations: Better-class hotels; many tourist camps.

Art Collections: Oriental Museum, Planetarium, Naglee and Park Aves. Concert Halls: Montgomery Theater, Civic Auditorium. Dance Halls: The Balconades, 181 W. Santa Clara St. Majestic Ballroom, 55 N. 3rd St. Trianon Ballroom, 43 W. San Antonio St. Radio Stations: KQW (1010 kc.), 87 E. San Antonia St. Motion Picture Theaters (first-run): Three. Amateur and Little Theaters: Montgomery Theater, Civic Auditorium. Road Shows: Civic Auditorium.

Auto Racing: San Jose Speedway, Alum Rock Ave. Baseball: “Semi-pro” teams, Santa Clara Ball Park. Basketball: Civic Auditorium. Bowling: Boitano, F. J., 57 S. Market St. Forman's Arena, 409 San Augustine St. Osborne, C. H., 32 W. San Fernando St. San Jose Bowling Palace, 172 W. Santa Clara St. Santone and Howell, 77 N. 1st St. Wagner, Harry, 55 W. San Carlos St. Boxing and Wrestling: Civic Auditorium. Bicycle Racing: Garden City Velodrome (occasional races May-Sept.), Wabash Ave. and Olive Sts. Football: Spartan Field Stadium, S. 7th and E. Humboldt Sts. Golf: Hillview Public Golf Course, Tully Rd. and Swift Lane. San Jose Country Club, Alum Rock Ave. La Rinconada Golf Club, Los Gatos. Los Altos Country Club, Los Altos. Hiking: Alum Rock Park, Alum Rock Ave. Riding: 25 miles of bridle paths in Alum Rock Park. Stables: Western Riding Academy, San Jose Riding Academy, Braine Riding Academy, Alum Rock Ave. Roller Skating: Auditorium Roller Rink, 1066 The Alameda. Swimming: Roosevelt Junior High School pool (open to the public summer evenings; adm. 35¢, includes suit and towel), 19th St. and Santa Clara Ave. Woodrow Wilson Junior High School pool (open during summer). Grant and Vine Sts. Alum Rock Park, Alum Rock Ave. Tennis: San Jose Tennis Courts (lighted), S. 7th St. and E. Humboldt St. Backesto Park (12 courts), N. 13th and Jackson Sts.

 

At the heart of the rich Santa Clara Valley lies SAN JOSE (92 alt., 62,298 pop.), ten miles below the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Center of a rich agricultural region, San Jose's busy downtown district is dominated by tall modern office buildings; but the greater number of its business blocks date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Along the shaded residential streets are hundreds of well-kept, old frame houses dating from the seventies and eighties, set among trim lawns and pleasant gardens.

Despite its having been for 70 years a town where only Spanish was spoken, San Jose has retained surprisingly little of this heritage. For three generations it has been predominantly American. The Latin languages heard most frequently today are Italian and Portuguese.

In 1777 Lieutenant Jose Moraga, acting under orders from Don Felipe de Neve, selected nine soldiers “of known agricultural skill” from the presidios of San Francisco and Monterey and five pobladores (settlers); these men and their families—66 persons—he took to the site chosen for the pueblo San Jose de Guadalupe—about a mile and a quarter north of the present center of San Jose. To each man were given a homesite and a small piece of ground to till. Although the soil was excellent, it was flooded each winter by the Guadalupe River. In 1797 the pobladores moved to a new location centering at the corner of what is now South Market and West San Fernando Streets. There is little recorded of the happenings in the pueblo during the occupancy of its original site, although in 1784 “some of the settlers were imprisoned and put in irons for refusing to work on a house for the town council,” and “two boys drowned an Indian to amuse themselves, but in consideration of their tender years were dismissed with twenty-five lashes administered in the presence of the natives.”

In the 1820’s the pobladores received their first English-speaking settler, Robert Livermore, who moved north after a few years into the valley which now bears his name. Other Englishmen and Americans had arrived before 1835, but by marrying into the Higuera, Galindo, Saiz, and other influential families they became identified with the native Californians. Within another ten years, however, the Americans had so increased that with the reorganization of the pueblo after the American occupation of California in 1846, six out of twelve committee men were Americans, as was the new alcalde.

With an eye to the pueblo's future, the citizens met in September, 1849 and offered to the Constitutional Convention assembled in Monterey some 21 acres “for the sole purpose of erecting State buildings thereon.” The offer was accepted. In December of that year the Legislature met in an adobe building at San Antonio and Market Streets. Among the official acts at that first session was the incorporation, March 27, 1850, of the capital city, which thus became the first incorporated community in California (San Francisco's charter was granted three weeks later).

The capital was moved to Vallejo in 1852, thence to Benicia, and finally to Sacramento. The citizens of San Jose strove earnestly but unsuccessfully for its repossession. Victory hove in sight when the Supreme Court decided on an appeal in 1854 that San Jose was the legal capital, but soon afterward it reversed its decision.

As early as 1851 there had been talk of a railroad to San Francisco, for the fare by stage was $16 and the cost of shipping lumber from Alviso, $15 per thousand. The railroad finally came in 1864—“a proof,” in the opinion of the San Jose Mercury, “of American enterprise, foresight and determination.” Cattle and grain were still the chief products, the country south of Gilroy being an almost unbroken wheat field, but the number of orchards was increasing, and some vineyards were already known, particularly that of Colonel Naglee, who had set out (in what is now the northwestern part of town) more than 100 varieties of grapes. Within the city, which by 1870 had a population of about 13,000, were carriage and wagon shops, foundries, breweries, tanneries, and woolen and flour mills run by water from the abundant artesian wells. In this same year the State Normal School was established. With the building of many new homes, San Jose began to call itself the “Garden City.”

The subdivision of the great wheat ranches and the planting of orchards continued. San Jose was shipping more and more dried prunes to the Eastern markets. The nascent art of advertising was being used to attract people with money to Santa Clara County. In a ten-acre park the big wooden Hotel Vendome with its fat bay windows was ready in 1889, “with electric lights and hot water.”

In 1894 San Jose's Dr. Charles D. Herrold transmitted a distance of 60 feet California's first wireless message. By 1909 he had perfected the first successful “radio telephone station” in America, and by 1913 he was communicating with the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. (Except during the World War this station, now KQW, has broadcast without interruption.) Continuing San Jose's reputation for “firsts,” Dr. August Greth in 1903 built America's first dirigible, the 85-foot Spirit of California, which Captain Thomas S. Baldwin flew over San Francisco. In the same year an ambitious young producer named Sid Grauman (who was later to build Hollywood's Egyptian and Chinese Theaters) opened on Santa Clara Street a vaudeville house which, in deference to the gentility of San Jose, displayed the sign, “No liquor or cigars will be allowed, and no tickets sold to persons not fit to be with women and children.” Here Al Jolson made his debut and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was chore boy and ticket seller.

San Jose's foremost industry, the shipping of fresh, dried, and canned fruit, meanwhile was growing enormously. A little woodshed in 1871 housed Santa Clara County's first commercial cannery when J. M. Dawson and his wife packed 300 cases of peaches, pears, cherries, and apricots. To protect a shipment of fresh fruit sent to Chicago in 1876, John Z. Anderson, former operator of a line of freight teams between California and Nevada, converted a railroad freight car into the industry's first “reefer,” or refrigerator car, by packing ice around boxes of cherries. Now green-fruit-packing houses make annually large shipments of such highly perishable fruits as pears, cherries, grapes, apricots, and prunes. Of the County's 43 canneries—the 1939 output of which was 72,000,000 cans, or 4,000 carloads—23 are in San Jose; of its 30 dried-fruit-packing plants, half are in the city. At the season's peak between 15,000 and 20,000 persons are at work in the orchards, canneries, packing houses, and drying yards.

POINTS OF INTEREST

ST. JOSEPH'S CHURCH, 90 S. Market St., occupies the site of the original adobe church built in 1803 and dedicated to San Jose de Guadalupe. The larger adobe which replaced this in 1835 was so badly damaged in 1868 that it was torn down and the present church—an attempt at the neoclassic in wood, brick, and plaster—erected in its place.

On the site around which grew the original pueblo is CITY HALL PARK, an oval plaza dividing S. Market St. between W. San Fernando and W. San Carlos Sts. into two wide parkways. It contains the CITY HALL, built in 1889, a three-story building of red brick and cast iron with an ornate cornice and a wooden tower over the central doorway. In the park a plaque marks the SITE OF THE FIRST STATE CAPITOL, NE. cor. W. San Antonio and S. Market Sts. The adobe capitol building was 60 feet long and 40 feet wide, “protected by a veranda all round.”

A well-preserved relic of Spanish days, though much out of plumb, the FILIPELLI ADOBE, 243 S. Market St., built about 1840, stands in the rear of a large old-fashioned frame house and has been incorporated with an old one-story clapboard house.

SAN JOSE STATE COLLEGE, occupying the 26 acres of WASHINGTON PARK, S. Fourth, S. Seventh, E. San Fernando, and E. San Carlos Sts., is the successor to the State Normal School established in San Francisco in 1862, first in California. Moved to the present site in 1870, it was burned in 1880, rebuilt and again demolished, this time by the earthquake of 1906. The present group of buildings is built about a courtyard surrounded by elms, pepper trees, and palms. The college since 1921 has offered a four-year course with degrees of A.B. or B.Ed. In 1940, 3,800 students enrolled.

Now used as the infirmary of the San Jose State College, the EDWIN MARKHAM HOUSE, 430 S. Eighth St., is an old-fashioned residence faced with clapboard. Here the poet lived in the early 1870’s when a student at the normal school, and here his mother continued to live in later years.

The distinguishing feature of ST. JAMES PARK, N. First, N. Third, St. John, and E. St. James Sts., is a bronze Monument of William McKinley erected in 1902. In this park in 1933 occurred the lynching of two men accused of the kidnaping and murder of a wealthy merchant's son. An infuriated mob broke into the jail across the street and brought their victims to the park. The Nation rang with reverberations over the incident, heightened when Governor James Rolph, Jr., announced his approval of the mob's action.

The FOOD MACHINERY CORPORATION, 331 W. Julian St., occupies a long, russet-colored, stuccoed building. The corporation had a modest beginning in Los Gatos in 1883 when a retired inventor, John Bean, perfected a spraying pump, which he began manufacturing there and later in San Jose. Allied manufacturers amalgamated with Bean's Company until by 1940 it had become a $12,000,000 corporation, the largest manufacturer of equipment for canneries and orchards. Nailing machines, turbine pumps, milk-evaporating equipment, and maraschino-pitting machinery are among its many important developments. More than 1,600 persons are employed.

The GARCIA ADOBE, in the rear of 184 San Augustin St., was built about 1840. Formerly a residence, later a barn and hay loft, it is now filled with rubbish. The adobe walls are partly faced with boards.

ROSICRUCIAN HEADQUARTERS, Naglee Ave. from Chapman St. to Park Ave., is the center for North and South America of the “Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross” (AMORC). Claiming great antiquity, the order gives the names of Pythagoras, St. Francis, Dante, and Professor Albert Einstein as members. The buildings, which include an auditorium, a lecture hall and laboratories, and an oriental museum, are of concrete in a bewildering variety of oriental styles.

The Moorish arches and buff-colored concrete walls of the EGYPTIAN TEMPLE AND ORIENTAL MUSEUM (open Mon.-Fri. 9-5; Sat. 9-1; Sun. 12-5; Mon. eve. 7-9) are finished to simulate stuccoed walls in the process of peeling. Here the Rosicrucian order has a miscellaneous collection of old books and tapestries; Egyptian pottery, tomb images, and scarabs; and reproductions of an Assyrian gateway and an Egyptian temple. Visitors are given free pamphlets soliciting membership, one of which has an introduction signed, “Pro-fundis XIII.”

The PLANETARIUM BUILDING (open Sun. 2-5, 7:30-9; demonstrations 3:30 and 6; adm. 25¢, children 15¢), called “The Theater of the Skies,” is devoted to the Rosicrucian explanation of the roles of the planets and stars. The planetarium is one of five in the United States.

In the MUNICIPAL ROSE GARDEN, Naglee and Dana Aves., whose five and one-half acres of formal planting are intersected by long aisles of grass, flourish many varieties once popular but now seldom grown. The garden is pervaded by the old-time perfume of the Centifolia, the dusky sweetness of the Damask (Rose of Lancaster), the acid freshness of China roses, the pungency of the moss rose, the scent of winter apples in the foliage of the sweet briar. Standard and hybrid teas much grown 50 years ago, Safrano, Duchess de Brabant, La France, and Captain Christy, are well represented, as are the many newer and more striking hybrids. Against the brick walls grow many varieties of climbing roses.

The well-preserved, grayish-white, two-story SPIVALO ADOBE (private), 770 Lincoln Ave., has walls two feet thick. From a crumbling veranda a double door between two seven-foot shuttered windows leads inside, where a polished mahogany stairway climbs to the second floor. The marble fireplace and the lumber used in the structure were brought around the Horn. A fig tree, 8 feet in circumference and 80 feet tall, planted when the adobe was new, stands at the southeast corner.

The CALIFORNIA CANNING AND PACKING COMPANY, W. end of W. San Carlos St., is the largest canning-packing plant in San Jose. The huge canning and packing units each occupy a modern red-brick building roofed with dark tin. Salad fruits and vegetables are canned the year round; asparagus from April to June; string beans, from June to November; spinach from January to April. The peak season for apricots, peaches, plums, pears, and tomatoes comes in July, August, and September.

The two-story STOCKTON HOUSE, Spring and Newhall Sts., built in 1850, is one of a number of houses cut to size and brought around the Horn by Commodore Robert F. Stockton. It has a wide veranda and, rising from the central gable, a square balustraded turret.