The view looking east toward the San Jose Fairmont Plaza is not what it used to be. And it never was.
As I wait for my pizza at Poppy & Claro, a new California-themed restaurant in the Knight-Ridder Building in downtown San Jose, I begin to look at my phone. Since I am surrounded by dress shirts that resemble graph paper, social media becomes more interesting. Lo and behold, in a Facebook group dedicated to San Francisco, I see that someone has posted a passage from legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, a passage titled “Drifting Shadows.”
Before the food even arrives, the serendipity of the moment inspires me. In said passage, Caen looked out his window at the “teeming crest of Nob Hill, where the garish mansions of the nouveaux riches once blossomed.” And then this line: “On California St., time and traffic signals stand still as a cable car rattles into the past it never left.”
Then he mentions “a slice of the Fairmont, with its endless double-parked tour buses and trucks” and “the beautiful, open-faced facade of the Mark Hopkins, the Beaux Arts charms of 1001 California and the Huntington’s parapets, Grace Cathedral’s carillon showering silvery notes across Huntington Park.” A perfect period piece of the ’20s, as he described the scene.
In downtown San Jose, where I scroll through these words, I am right smack in the middle of a neighborhood that gets created and destroyed over and over again, so there is no such period piece. We’re lucky that developers haven’t smashed St. Joseph’s Cathedral and replaced it with a data center.
As such, I cannot separate the current moment from the days when the San Jose Fairmont was under construction. Beginning in 1986 or so, the mammoth new accommodation rose from the wreckage, along with the eventually-to-be-named Knight-Ridder Building, where I now sit.
In actuality, though, the Knight-Ridder building is now called “50 West” because the address is 50 West San Fernando. That’s a stupid name, so everyone still calls it the Knight-Ridder building. At least everyone I hang out with.
Same with the student housing at 27 N. Sixth Street, officially called “27 North,” or the accommodations at 101 East San Fernando, likewise called “101 San Fernando.” There’s more. Over at the “vibrant nexus of San Pedro Square and Silicon Valley’s innovation corridor,” one finds housing called—drum roll, please—188 West Saint James.
And we wonder why everyone keeps talking about identity around here. Herb Caen insulted San Jose for half his life. This is the reason.
But I’m here not to complain. The idea is to find the overlapping points between history and everyday life. And that is where the Fairmont comes in.
In the ’60s and ’70s, San Jose bulldozed many historic downtown buildings, sometimes even entire blocks, and turned much of the neighborhood into a desert of empty parking lots. Then they wondered why no one came downtown for 20 years.
When the Fairmont opened in 1987, followed by the Knight-Ridder Building soon thereafter, people laughed. In addition to empty parking lots, downtown had become a half-boarded-up wasteland of crumbling retail, skid-row porn and several Vietnamese restaurants. Light rail construction was tearing up the neighborhood. You couldn’t get anywhere.
Why build a luxury hotel? Who would stay there?
Yet the Fairmont proved everyone wrong. Over the years, it hosted two sitting US Presidents, several foreign heads of state and countless sports teams, plus conventions, rock stars and celebrities. Even Allen Ginsberg stayed there.
Throughout my travels, whenever I visited Fairmonts in other places, especially Canada, the concierge had only heard of San Jose because we had a Fairmont. They’d ask me if San Jose was near San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Nowadays, I often write about ghosts. Herb Caen’s term is better. The drifting shadows.
When the pizza arrives, I give up on social media and put my phone away. The pie is fantastic. The combo of Fra’mani Salami Rosa, burrata, pistachios and fiery Calabrian chilis is a home run. The neighborhood is definitely better with Poppy & Claro.
And that would be the walk-off here. Rather than complain, at least identify something better than before. See you in the shadows.
