.The Jackhammers Are Back on Paseo de San Antonio

Ghosts of Muji, the Cinequest VIP Lounge and Pic-a-Dilly Fine Food are watching over the jackhammers.

When I hear construction noise inside an abandoned Japanese retailer that only existed because a hotel was moved 186 feet down the street so that a newer hotel could expand in its place, an expansion that later also failed and was then saved by a university to house students, I can only be in San Jose.

The southwest corner of First Street and what’s now called Paseo de San Antonio, the ground-level corner of the former Fairmont Annex, has been vacant for years, ever since Muji shut its doors. 

Muji originally opened in 2013, to major fanfare. It seemed like every developer and real estate broker in San Jose was there. Multiple news cameras arrived for the occasion. After many years of downtown retail failure, San Jose had become the only city on earth where the opening of one store constituted a major news story. So that’s what happened.

Unfortunately, seven years later, the pandemic forced Muji to close, so the space went vacant yet again. C’est la vie.

For a couple years before this, in 2011 and 2012, Cinequest used the same space for its VIP Lounge during the film festival—yet another example of arts intelligentsia converting abandonment into creativity.

The building in question came into being in the early aughts after Fairmont owner Lew Wolff demanded the city give him millions to add an additional annex to the hotel, which required relocating another structure that stood in the way—the defunct Hotel Montgomery. San Jose was an attention-starved city, desperate for any possible name recognition, anything to “put us on the map,” so if Lew Wolff wanted more hotel rooms, the city was happy to oblige.

Originally San Jose’s most lavish accommodation when it opened in 1911, the Montgomery had long since fallen into neglect and disrepair. In a highly publicized and contentious adventure, the city literally picked up the building and moved it 186 feet down First Street so Lew Wolff could then build his Fairmont extension, while the Montgomery then underwent costly restoration. Only in San Jose would such absurdity take place.

Nowadays, any native who looks at the current incarnation of the old Fairmont Annex—the building that now includes SJSU student housing, Bijan Bakery and maybe a new tenant on the corner—will remember that corner as the original location of the old Hotel Montgomery.

As a wandering Zen-adjacent scholar inspired by ancient ruins, I’m more interested in the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth, which tend to happen at every single corner around here. When I heard the jackhammers signaling the possible arrival of a new tenant, my gaze went straight back to some old photos of the same corner, when the Montgomery was still there.

A fabulous shot from the late ’60s depicts the hotel in all its faded glory, after it morphed into an $80-a-month flophouse. The despair is inspiring. Facing First Street, we see Guttman’s, a boarded-up women’s clothing store, plus Squires Restaurant, likewise shuttered. On the corner, we can spot “budget dinner plates” at Pic-a-Dilly Fine Food. An optometrist office appears in the middle. At the southern end is the Skol Room, the hotel’s cocktail lounge.

The Skol Room was owned by Nate Wasserman, the same guy that opened the Branham Lounge in 1969. But that’s a different column.

Much of downtown at this time looked similar: retail struggling to survive as the neighborhood deteriorated; transient hotels, dive bars and worn-out steakhouses; medical and legal offices inside peeling mid-rises. Yet up the block remained Orange Julius, See’s Candies, Frederick’s of Hollywood, a crumbling Montgomery Ward department store and the Sapphire Lounge—also another future column.

But this is not about the past. Ultimately, I am after beauty in the mundane. I am experiencing the ongoing cycle of births, deaths and reincarnations, this time at the southwest corner of First and San Antonio. When I sit inside Bijan Bakery and see the SJSU WiFi appear on my laptop, and I see the flow of students leaving the building on their way to school, I see nothing but beauty, and I am content in the present moment.