May 7, 2009 – A Ride Downtown on the San Jose Light Rail

It was about 20 minutes before 8:00 AM on a Friday morning in early March. I had just dropped off my car with Franklin at his garage on Winfield Blvd in the Blossom Valley neighborhood of San Jose, California for its periodic service. Franklin dropped me at the Almaden Station of the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) light rail spur (also called the Almaden Shuttle), which runs between Almaden station and Ohlone/Chynoweth station, named for the Ohlone Indian tribe that settled California before the Gold Rush and Mary Folsom Hayes Chynoweth owner of Hayes Mansion. I boarded the two-car electric train about to depart. The trip took less than five minutes and stopped only once at the Oakridge Shopping Mall station. No sooner had I disembarked at Ohlone/Chynoweth station—and the shuttle reversed and headed back to Almaden Station—than the VTA’s Alum Rock-Santa Teresa light rail train pulled into the station and I boarded, along with a couple dozen others, for the trip north.

My light rail trip had begun, a ride along Highway 87 through a part of San Jose I seldom get a chance to see. Instead of letting someone else drive, I’m usually zooming by though never during compute hours unless it’s a holiday or on the weekend, eyes glued to the road. Taking public transportation is giving yourself over to an automated system that you cannot control. Trains arrive and depart at prescribed intervals and you are responsible for being at a terminal at the appointed time of departure or face a 15-minute wait for the next train in the schedule: the concern of the many over that of the individual. Public transport is a form of socialism where everyone is treated equal. I board without buying a ticket at the station kiosk because my company has provided all its employees with light rail passes.

The VTA, which Santa Clara County residents voted into being on June 6, 1972, is relatively young as mass transits systems go. It came into being under the stewardship of 59th Mayor of San Jose, Norman Yoshio Mineta, the first Asian American ever to head a major U.S. city. The mass transit’s rolling stock came from three financially strapped local bus lines—Peninsula Transit, San Jose City Lines, and Peerless Stages. VTA, then called Santa Clara County Transit District (SCCTD) acquired the assets on January 1, 1973. In 1982 the federal government funded the preliminary engineering phase for the County’s first light rail line during Mineta’s tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives as Santa Clara County’s congressman.

The ride north passes by the San Juan Bautista Hills on the east, atop which sits Communications Hill, the large Kaufman-Broad high density housing development that began covering the hillside a little over a decade ago. The name Communications Hill comes from 11 large microwave towers located on top of Oak Hill. The development sits between the Capital Expressway and Curtner Light Rail Stations. The station before Capital is Branham, which follows Ohlone/Chynoweth. Every morning I run across the earthen bridge that carries Branham Lane over the rail station and Highway 87, and watch for a few moments the light rail and the early morning commute traffic on the freeway zooming by at the limit below me. Beyond, Curtner is the Tamien Station—named for the Tamien Indians that inhabited the Santa Clara Valley. There passengers seeking an even smaller carbon front prints disembark the light rail board Caltrain to stations north along the Peninsula or to stations south toward Morgan Hill and Gilroy.

The light Rail parallels Highway 87 just after leaving the Ohlone/Chynoweth station for five stops—the last of which is Virginia. From there it cuts right under the freeway and meanders left by the Children’s Discover Museum on Woz Way. Of the two Steve’s forming Apple, Wozniak got the street in front of the Museum named for him. Jobs, by far the more famous of the two, didn’t, perhaps because Woz was the largest private donor funding the museum. My wife and I took our grandkids to the museum. We found it thoroughly engaging.

If I were homeless, the underpasses the light rail lines runs under just before the museum would be decent shelter from the elements, though I’ve never seen obvious signs of habitation as the train passes by. I find it curious how hope—the museum—and despair—the underpass—reside side by side.

Once the light rail leaves Virginia Station, the 60 MPH speed it clocks between the stations along Highway 87 slows to a crawl approaching and beyond the museum, where the rail makes a hard right turn onto San Carlos Street, the metal wheels squealing until the length of the two cars have straighten and the train rumbles over the Guadalupe River bridge, past the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, over Almaden Boulevard to stop at the Convention Center Station. Look south from the station and you’ll see the original San Jose Martin Luther King Library, a gathering place for our young family when we first moved here in 1974, now abandoned for newer digs at San Jose State University.

The convention center, which sits behind the abandoned library and runs the entire block from Almaden Boulevard to Market Street was named for Tom McEnery, San Jose’s 61st mayor from 1983 to 1990. It was during his tenure that the light rail system was constructed and a good amount of downtown San Jose was developed, from the early 20th Century California agricultural town architecture to the high-rise urban area is has become.

Once you leave Convention Center Station, the train takes a leisurely pass through that San Jose of old. The first landmark is the six-story Sainte Claire Hotel at 302 South Market Street opened in 1926 offering all the big city luxuries of the time. Furnishings from Czechoslovakia still fill the antique lobby. The lounge and lobby are adorned with a hand-painted ceiling. Wealthy San Jose landowner Thomas S. Montgomery contracted the San Francisco architectural firm Weeks and Day to build the hotel. The firm had built the Mark Hopkins, the Sir Francis Drake, and the Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill. Now dwarfed by the towering new Marriot across the street and the Three Sixty Residences, a 23-story luxury downtown San Jose condo complex under construction behind it, the hotel continues to bring the turn-of-the-century French beaux arte look and feel to the South Bay

Next to the hotel is the Sainte Claire Building at 301 S 1st Street on the corner of Market, another Montgomery property Weeks and Day built. Opened in April 1925, local architect Herman Krause designed the ground floor for Appleton’s Clothing Store, while numerous medical professionals offices occupied the floors above. Spared the wrecking ball, the building has been turned into condominiums for residents who prefer early 20th Century milieu with 21st Century amenities. The recently renovated ground floor is home to Original Joe’s, a spin off of Original Joe's that the Rocca Family opened in San Francisco in 1937. The San Jose version opened its doors May 24, 1956 and has been at the same location ever since still owned and operated by the Rocca Family and its associates.

The light rail turns left at Original Joe’s and heads north along South First Street, passing on the left the Montgomery Hotel at 211 S 1st Street, an 86-room boutique hotel and another landmark downtown building that opened in 1911, a boutique European style hotel back then as it is today. Designed by local architect William Binder, it was also owned by T. S. Montgomery. The hotel was originally located where the new section of the Fairmont Hotel sits today. The old hotel was moved 186 feet south of its original site on January 29, 2000, with a large number of spectators on hand to watch the historic event, at a cost of over $12 million. The relocation broke a record as it was the heaviest building, at 9.6 million pounds, ever moved. Special equipment built for the project included remote controlled machinery placed under the structure, which inched along for more than 3 hours before reaching its destination.

The hotel now rests across the street from the Paseo de San Antonio light rail station and on Friday nights, my wife and I join dinners at the Mosaic Restaurant and Lounge—previously the Paragon Restaurant and Lounge—and watch the parade of buses, lightrail trains, cars and pedestrians as they enter and leave the open air station. Paseo de San Antonio is near ground zero for the founding of San Jose. In 1777 Don Felipe de Neve selected Lieutenant Jose Moraga to command nine soldiers skilled in farming, five pobladores (settlers), and their families—66 people in all. He directed Moraga to establish the pueblo San Jose de Guadalupe along the banks of the Guadalupe River. By 1797 after being flooded out each winter by the river, the settlers moved to the corner of what is now South Market and West San Fernando Streets—a half block north and a block west of the Paseo.

Near the Paseo de San Antonio station, at 210 S. 1st Street is the historic Twohy building an office space constructed in 1917 for Judge John W. Twohy. Now renovated into a mixed commercial/loft-housing complex of 36 apartments. Curiously, a recent attempt at large scale redevelopment in downtown San Jose near the site of the turn-of-the-century success failed. The Palladium Company a leading national developer of mixed-use projects in urban centers proposed to redevelop a five-block area in downtown San Jose, that the train I’m on cuts through: Mitchell Block—bounded by St. John, West Santa Clara, North First and North Market; Fountain Alley—along First Street; Zanotto's parking lot; a parcel at First and San Fernando; and Block 3—at South Second and West San Fernando.

In total the project would have built 500,000 square feet of retail space, a 350-room hotel, 350,000 square feet of office space and more than 1,000 downtown homes. On March 25, 2002, in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble implosion, Palladium pulled out after investing more than $3.5 million in the project. The Palladium proposal would have required approximately $1 billion in private investment. The massive complex at Santana Row, which was as ambitious as the downtown project, had begun a few years earlier and was nearing completion. It coasted through the recession to great success in its aftermath. In the process, Santana Row diverted the commercial trade that might have been captured downtown had the Palladium project completed. Timing is everything.