.Acropolis Now

If India can transform its ruins into tourist traps, so should San Jose. The abandoned stretch along Bascom is a perfect example.

I first wrote about this decaying masterpiece about 10 years ago, but since the building is still sitting there virtually unchanged, another visit became necessary. At this point, San Jose should submit the whole site to UNESCO and apply for World Heritage Status. It could be our version of the Acropolis in Athens. Tourists might actually visit.

While wandering along the chain-link fence and taking photos, which of course couldn’t happen without a few cars honking at me, I felt enlightened, as if I’d discovered the ruins of Nalanda University in India. I felt like a traveler from ancient times. Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta or the Chinese traveling monk Xuanzang all came to mind.

Now, I have been obsessed with Bascom Avenue for many years, which is why the history became unavoidable as I navigated the fence that prevented me from getting any closer to Club 4, a notorious former dive bar. As I stood there, a solitary crow jumped back and forth between his perch on the fence and the roof of the decrepit building, right above where Club 4 once was.

In more colorful days, there was a Club 4 neon sign. At nighttime, once you got past Pink Poodle, there were hardly any lights on this stretch of road to look at, except for that sign and the Tip Top Liquors sign.

Right next door to Club 4, the ruin of Big Al’s Record Barn wasn’t much better. If you thought ten bucks for a thrift-store copy of some crappy Jim Nabors LP 30 years ago was a good price, well, I can’t help you anyway. And that may have been something I saw at his old location on El Camino. It’s all a blur, just like Club 4.

In the same way that Xuanzang spent years traveling from China to India in search of ancient Buddhist texts to translate, I consulted the secret dive bar archives and brought back my own history of Bascom. I went back a whopping 60 years, to 1965, before 280 even existed, and discovered that this stretch of road featured a lot more gas stations and, drum roll please, a lot more dive bars.

The service stations carried more homey names. Gene’s Chevron. Lou & Ray’s Gas Station. Stuff like that.

In 1965, Club 4 was already there, as was Tip Top Liquors, but it was called McQueen’s Liquors, after the guy who built the place. Even today, if you look up, you’ll see “McQueen Building” on the facade.

Also in 1965, a dump called Victor’s Club occupied the address of 328 S. Bascom. Soon thereafter it became the Pink Poodle.

Similarly, at 840 Bascom was Trappy’s cocktail lounge, a place that featured country music. Not too far away, at 860 S. Bascom, was the Hole in the Wall Tavern, where H&R Block is now.

Of course, the legendary Murray’s came next. Opening in 1953, when Bascom was still called San Jose-Los Gatos Road, Murray’s eventually occupied a spot right across the street from where Streetlight Records now sits. One of the all-time legends of San Jose bar history, proprietor Murray Martin passed away in 2003, just a few months after his bar celebrated 50 years in business.

I put the word out, in search of sordid memories. about Murray’s. Many chimed in.

“I would buy my eggs there, they were on one corner of the bar,” said a friend.

“I had many taxi pulls from Murray’s,” said a former Checker Cab driver. “They typically weren’t fun drunks.”

Another person who worked at the nearby Kelly Moore Paints had this to say: “We opened at 7:30am. Murray’s parking lot would be filled with painter’s trucks at 6.”

I cannot vouch for the veracity of these claims, of course.

But back to the ancient ruins. Club 4, Ritz Cleaners and Big Al’s Record Barn remain for all to see. The whole damn strip should be a tourist attraction. A wealth of knowledge, and artifacts, surely remain buried inside.

Call UNESCO. Get ’em out here. Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Xuanzang would demand it.