.Revisiting the Djinns of Downtown San Jose

The ramshackle San Jose hodgepodge of Park Avenue history beckoned me once again. Ghosts of Leather Masters and the Radiator Doctor returned to life.

Nearly ten years ago, on this very page, the columnist explored the older portions of Park Avenue, inspired by William Dalrymple’s travel book, City of Djinns. In Dalrymple’s telling, the djinns, the old ghosts, emerged everywhere in Delhi, his home town, an ancient metropolis sacked over and over again throughout millennia, often leaving a beautifully incongruous clutter of structures along a single stretch of road. The ruins were precisely what fascinated him.

No matter how often planners colluded to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, Dalrymple wrote, no matter how hard they tried, crumbling towers, old mosques or abandoned ruins suddenly appeared, intruding on the city blocks. Even though much of the old city from centuries or even decades earlier had been destroyed by violence, the old buildings, just like spirits, often came out of nowhere, even after they were pushed out for shiny new constructions. The physical and the temporal aspects of Delhi seemed to merge. No matter how many times the city was destroyed, pieces of it always seemed to reincarnate.

I felt the same way about San Jose, albeit on a much smaller level of course, just because developers had smashed various blocks out of existence, often the same blocks, over and over throughout the course of the 20th century, often with nothing to show for it except lifelessly uniform housing. The leftover stuff, in my view, was the only interesting stuff to look at.

Since Dalrymple just gave a talk at the Commonwealth Club last week, where he signed my copy of City of Djinns, I just had to once again amble down, and up, the backwater stretches of Park Avenue I still loved so much. I headed westward from Highway 87 all the way past Race Street and then back again because this passage of road was like traveling back in time through four or five different eras of San Jose history all on the same street. The aforementioned hodgepodge of retail, industrial and residential could only have emerged in organic fashion. No bureaucratic real estate syndicate could have created an area more interesting.

Yet this time, it was slightly different. In pure San Jose fashion, most places that I mentioned ten years ago no longer existed, but I’d grown to understand that nothing in San Jose ever lasted in the same place, whether it was hair salons, furniture stores or Vedanta folks giving Sanskrit lessons in a janky building. There would always be more coffee shops, though, as I noticed.

This time the abandonment came in the form of a defunct fire department training facility at Park and Montgomery, right across the street from a vacant lot that used to be the KNTV Channel 11 television station going back to the ’50s. The city of San Jose eyeballed much of this area during the ten years it spent trying to lure the Oakland A’s away from Oakland. It didn’t work.

Now the same general area is part of Googletown, which likewise doesn’t seem like it will ever happen. Ten years from now, we can all conjure up ghosts of the Googletown that never was.

That has an amazing ring to it: “The Ghosts of Googletown.” Somebody should write a song.

Yet pieces of the beautiful hodgepodge did still remain. The building at 534 Park, for example, formerly the legendary Radiator Doctor, was now something else, with the address spray painted on the front of the building. Anytime an address is spray painted, I know I’m in the right neighborhood. At the time of my previous column ten years ago, Radiator Doctor had already traveled on, and this was not its only location, but every connoisseur of San Jose underbelly remembers the Radiator Doctor.

There was so much more. The djinns appeared everywhere. Buildings were burned out or flattened. Offices were relocated. Bulldozers sat dormant in vacant lots, right next to crates of unused piping. Boxing lessons and ax-throwing businesses were now prominent.

Such was life in the big city and I relished the changes, knowing that nothing was ever permanent.