Inside a food hall in downtown San Jose there is an adobe house built in 1797 by a man named Manuel Gonzales, who was Apache and who walked here with the Anza expedition. It is the last surviving structure of the original pueblo. People eat tacos next to it.
That's the whole city in one image. San Jose has more history than anywhere else in Northern California and spends most of its energy being called the Capital of Silicon Valley — a slogan a mayor's office adopted in 1988.
It was here first
El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe was founded on November 29, 1777 — the first civilian town in Alta California. Not a mission, not a fort: an actual town, of about sixty-six people, meant to grow food for the presidios. Los Angeles wasn't founded until 1781. San Jose is four years older.
It was also California's first state capital. The first legislature convened here on December 15, 1849, and stayed until the capital moved to Vallejo in January 1852. (Careful with this one: Monterey was the capital under Spain and Mexico. San Jose was the first capital of the state.)
They met in a two-story adobe hotel, because the promised statehouse wasn't finished. Winter flooding made the streets impassable, there was nowhere to stay, and the session earned a nickname that has outlived every bill it passed: the Legislature of a Thousand Drinks. The site is marked downtown by the Circle of Palms.
Why downtown is so short
The tallest building in San Jose is 200 Park Avenue, at 300 feet. For a city of nearly a million people, that is a remarkable number.
Everyone blames the airport, and the airport is part of it — Mineta is three miles from downtown and federal airspace rules cap what you can build under the approach. But the fuller answer is more interesting.
From 1950 to 1969, city manager A.P. "Dutch" Hamann executed 1,377 annexations. In its entire history before him, San Jose had done forty-two. His annexation team was known around city hall as Dutch's Panzer Division. The city went from roughly 17 square miles to about 180. The population went from 95,000 to half a million.
San Jose didn't build up. It built out, faster than almost any American city ever has, and more than 90% of its land ended up zoned for single-family homes. Then Valley Fair opened in 1956 and pulled the retail out of downtown, and City Hall itself moved out in 1958, and the county offices followed, and the freeways were built so it was easier to drive around downtown than through it.
Japantown
This is the part that should be famous.
Before the Second World War there were more than eighty Japanese American communities across the United States. Three survive. San Francisco's Japantown, Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, and this one — the only one that isn't in a city people write about. In December 2025 the state finally designated it a California Cultural District, the only one in San Jose.
How it got here is not a comfortable story.
On May 4, 1887, San Jose's Market Street Chinatown burned. About 1,400 residents were displaced. The fire department worked only to keep the fire from spreading beyond Chinatown; the local papers cheered. The city council had voted a decade earlier to get rid of the place. San Jose formally apologized in 2021 and called it arson.
Ten days after the fire, a German-American rancher named John Heinlen leased land to the displaced Chinese community, who were barred from owning it themselves, and hired an architect to lay out a new quarter. It was called Heinlenville. He received death threats for it. When Japanese immigrants began arriving around 1890, Heinlenville is where they found lodging, and Japantown grew westward out of it.
By 1941 there were fifty-three businesses here. Then Executive Order 9066, and in three days in May 1942 roughly six thousand Santa Clara County residents were processed and sent to Tule Lake, Poston and Heart Mountain. (The community's own word for this is incarceration, and the camps are called what they were. Follow their lead.) Japantown emptied out. Most people came back by 1947, many having lost everything they owned.
What's still standing is the point:
- Kogura Company, 231 Jackson — founded 1928, in the same building since 1934. It is the oldest business at its original location in any Japantown in the United States, and the third generation of the family is behind the counter. It survived the war because a San Jose attorney named J.B. Peckham held the family's property so there would be, in the grandson's words, someplace to come back to.
- Shuei-Do Manju Shop, 217 Jackson — 1953, same recipes.
- Santo Market — 1946.
- Nichi Bei Bussan — started in San Francisco in 1902; the SF store closed in 1997, so San Jose's, opened 1948, is the one that's left.
- Roy's Station — a 1935 Mobil gas station run by the Murotsune family for about fifty years after they came out of the Arizona camps, now a café run by the same family.
- San Jose Taiko — founded 1973, only the third taiko group ever formed outside Japan.
Willow Glen
The best short story in San Jose. In 1927 the community of Willow Glen incorporated as a city — a sixth-class city, the smallest category California law allowed — for one reason: to stop the Southern Pacific Railroad from running its trunk line down Lincoln Avenue. It worked. The railroad went through North Willow Glen instead.
Nine years later, in September 1936, Willow Glen voted 978 to 871 to be annexed by San Jose. The reason was sewage. The area was marshy with a high water table, the septic systems were overflowing, and the town had to either build its own treatment plant or join one. It joined.
Incorporated to keep a railroad out, dissolved over its own plumbing, in less than a decade.
Lincoln Avenue is still the spine, and it got that name in 1865, right after the assassination. Hicklebee's, the children's bookstore, has been on it since 1979.
The East Side
Alum Rock Park was established in 1872 — 720 acres up a canyon in the Diablo foothills, and the city calls it California's oldest municipal park. From about 1890 to 1932 it was a nationally known mineral springs resort: twenty-seven springs, an indoor pool of heated sulfur water, a dance pavilion, a tea garden, and its own railroad running visitors up the canyon. Rail service ended in July 1932. The stone grottos built over the springs are still there, and you can walk right up to them.
A few miles away, McDonnell Hall at Our Lady of Guadalupe became a National Historic Landmark in 2016. It's a chapel that was built in 1914 somewhere else, taken apart in 1953 and rebuilt in the Mayfair neighborhood — and it was where César Chávez ran his chapter of the Community Service Organization before he left for Oxnard in 1958. The organizing that became the farmworker movement started in a moved building on the east side of San Jose.
And along Story Road is Little Saigon. San Jose has the largest Vietnamese population of any single city in the world outside Vietnam — somewhere around 145,000 people. What to call the district became a genuine civic fight: the council voted 8–3 in 2007 for a compromise name, more than a thousand people turned up to a meeting in March 2008, and the council reversed itself 11–1. The district is officially unnamed to this day. Everybody calls it Little Saigon.
The Rose Garden, and the Egyptian temple
The San Jose Municipal Rose Garden was dedicated in April 1937 — five and a half acres, more than 3,500 shrubs, 189 varieties. Before that it was a prune orchard, which is the entire history of this valley in a single parcel of land.
Four blocks away is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum: an Egyptian Revival temple complex, built by a mystical order, holding the largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the western United States. It has been there since 1928. It is in a residential neighborhood. Almost nobody outside San Jose has heard of it.
Nearby, The Alameda was laid out around 1795 to connect the pueblo to Mission Santa Clara, and planted with willows in 1799. California's first stagecoach line ran on it in 1849 and the state's first interurban railway in 1868. The last of the original willows came down in 1982.
Little Portugal
Where East Santa Clara Street becomes Alum Rock Avenue. Most of the community came from the Azores rather than mainland Portugal, starting in the 1850s.
Five Wounds Portuguese National Church was established in November 1914, and it was built partly out of timber salvaged from the Portuguese Pavilion at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, hauled down by wagon. When BART finally reaches this side of the valley, the station behind the church will be called 28th Street/Little Portugal — renamed in 2019 after the neighborhood asked.
Two things about the teams
San Jose voters approved a tax measure to build an arena in June 1988. The city did not have a hockey team. They built the building first and went and got the franchise afterward — the Sharks were founded in May 1990 and played their first two seasons at the Cow Palace, forty-five miles away, while it was finished.
And the first goal ever scored in Major League Soccer was scored here: April 6, 1996, Spartan Stadium, Eric Wynalda, San Jose Clash over D.C. United, 1–0. Nobody outside San Jose remembers that.
About the Winchester house
Since it's the one thing everyone knows about San Jose, it's worth saying that most of it isn't true.
There is no evidence Sarah Winchester ever consulted a Boston medium. The doors and staircases that go nowhere are 1906 earthquake damage — she sealed off ruined sections instead of rebuilding them. Her letters show she sent the workers home for months at a time. The famous thirteens were mostly added after she died. None of her employees or relatives ever described her as mad; several stayed with her for decades, and she left them money and houses in her will.
What's actually documented: a woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis who had buried an infant daughter and her husband, who moved west for the climate, who spent thirty-six years designing and redesigning a house because she could, and who gave more than a million dollars to build a tuberculosis hospital in New Haven. She died in September 1922. The house opened as a paid attraction the following June.
The fact nobody knows
At 50 West San Fernando Street there is a California historical marker for something that happened here before anyone said "Silicon Valley."
In 1909, Charles Herrold started transmitting from a building on that corner — and from at least 1912 he was broadcasting music and news to an audience on a regular schedule. That is the first known regularly scheduled entertainment broadcasting anywhere in the world. He's called the Father of Broadcasting. (The honest caveat: he went dark from 1917 to 1921 under wartime rules, which is why the "world's first station" claim gets argued about. The regular-programming claim doesn't.)
His station eventually became KQW, then KCBS. It is still on the air. In 2006 KCBS moved its San Jose news bureau back to 50 West San Fernando — the same corner where the whole thing started.
Where it stands now
The median home sold for about $1.47 million in mid-2026. Median household income is around $162,800 — roughly double the national figure — and more than a quarter of Silicon Valley households still can't meet basic needs without assistance. The city crossed a million residents in 2014 and has quietly slipped back under it.
And there are about eighty acres of flattened concrete downtown where Google assembled land for a campus, razed what was there, and then paused. The 2021 agreement carried no penalty for not building. As of 2026 it's still parking lots.
The Capital of Silicon Valley, with a 1797 adobe in a food hall and eighty empty acres where the future was supposed to go. It's a better city than its slogan, and it has been here longer than any of them.
Rep the city: the San Jose collection has our California bear flag design made for San Jose on shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs and more. Around the bay: Fremont, Palo Alto and the whole Bay Area.