The block of Santa Clara Street between First and Second is fermenting on many levels.
Always in search of a more global context, I consulted a book on Paris to help me understand this block in a more poetic fashion.
As I sat at Fox Tale Fermentation, one of several eateries currently knocking it out of the park—both on this side of the block and on Fountain Alley, the other side—there was no way for me to separate everyday life from the grand sweep of history.
This is where The Other Paris, a tremendous book by Lucy Sante, came in handy. An inspiration for numerous columns over the years, The Other Paris remains miraculously applicable to San Jose on a local level. One can skip to any page and find long passages that describe every single block of downtown San Jo, especially the passages related to the flâneur, that legendary strolling character who observes the urban chaos from his own solitary detachment.
In the current moment, the modern-day flâneur reads about Paris in order to see the past more clearly and thus make the landscape more interesting to observe.
“What the flâneur sees while walking around is a tremendous expanse of time in compressed and vestigial form,” Sante writes, echoing the way many San Joseans look at these buildings. “The past is hardly a single era, after all, but the combined, composted layers of a thousand eras,” Sante adds, suggesting that any given moment includes a proportionate blend of previous years. In this case, it’s the ghost of Firato Delicatessen, which closed in the ’70s, although the empty shell sat there for years. Thankfully the sign still remains.
There was also the Key Man, the locksmith dude who sat in his alcove for I don’t know how many years, right next to Mike’s Shoe Repair and a crumbling eatery in a former turn-of-the-century theater. “Self serve restaurant,” is all the sign said. That tells you everything you need to know.
“The past is always in flux, surviving not in icily dust-free façade restorations but as a dynamic undercurrent,” Sante writes.
In San Jose’s case, it survives in the form of bus engine noise, working immigrants, street muralists, bar-industry impresarios, gutter rats, construction employees and bus stop transients. In Sante’s words, the past survives among vagrants and eccentrics, and “among a great many people lying low who remember things.”
That’s an amazing way to understand Santa Clara Street between First and Second.
It’s either this, or I write about the pools of nightclubber vomit that, were it not for the Groundwerx team, might remain for weeks. Or the embarrassing Jerry Springer-style fistfights spilling out into the intersections on weekends. Or the vapors of urine rising from sidewalks all day long.
City Hall hates it when I say these things. They think I’m minimizing all the hard work that others are doing. And many small business owners really are working extremely hard just to stay afloat. Those are the people I admire. Right now, you can get some incredible food, and drinks, on both sides of this block—Santa Clara Street and Fountain Alley.
That is why I parked myself inside Fox Tale Fermentation. I understood the neighborhood potential in a rice-and-bean burger with cultured cashew queso, beet beer mustard and sunflower crema. I knew the healing power of fermented grapefruit bitters with black tea and ashwagandha. I believed in a huge mug of kombucha.
But that doesn’t mean the ghosts will remove their fingerprints. Just like those of us “lying low who remember things,” the ghosts aren’t ready to disappear yet. As Lucy Sante brilliantly writes in The Other Paris, the ghosts are occult forces. They are “always at work, indifferent to rationality, scornful of politics, resentful of urban planning, only intermittently sympathetic to the wishes of the living.”
Maybe that’s why I relate to the ghosts so much.
Such occult forces operate “the way stalagmites and stalactites grow in caves.” They are the result of “vastly long passages of time, of buildup and wear-down so gradual that no time-lapse camera could ever record them.”
On this block, I feel that way too. We’ll never have Paris, but we’ll always have Santa Clara Street.
