You can’t tell the story of downtown San Jose without Vietnamese refugees.
Last week, on April 30, 2025, Vietnamese Americans filled the San Jose City Hall Rotunda to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, an annual gathering now called Black April. Many were descendants of refugees or even refugees themselves. The program went on for two hours.
These days, the stretch of Santa Clara Street where City Hall sits is relatively fixed up and shiny. Forty-five years ago, that wasn’t the case, when many Vietnamese refugees first started arriving and opening businesses in this part of downtown. Most of the neighborhood was a crime zone, a half-boarded-up skid row. At the time, nobody would possibly open up a new business in these parts. Nobody, that is, except for Vietnamese refugees.
As a traveler of both time and space, I could not separate the Black April event at City Hall from the Vietnamese businesses that used to exist along this exact same stretch of road. One of them, the grocery store owned by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s parents, I’ve written about several times already. But there were many more. As I sat there with all the Vietnamese people in black, ghosts of sandwich shops and a defunct Red Barn returned to life.
For a 1983 Mercury-News story, reporter Jonathan Marshall pounded the pavement at this exact intersection and wrote a hauntingly prescient story, in which he sampled many Vietnamese businesses that had just recently opened up, right where City Hall is now, across the street, and even around the corner on Third Street. There were more than 50, he wrote.
Yet it wasn’t just his love for French-Vietnamese sandwiches, a completely new cuisine.
“No, what struck me was that in the wasteland called downtown, I can now get a croissant, sandwich, or suit—all from Vietnamese businesses,” Marshall wrote. “Even as city planners spend years contemplating grandiose and expensive schemes to reconstruct the war zone, individual Vietnamese entrepreneurs are quietly bringing the ruins to life.”
There were tailors and restaurant owners, used car dealers and jewelry brokers, all Vietnamese, from First to Tenth, all along Santa Clara Street, in 1983, when this very stretch of road had long since deteriorated.
“Instead of razing what’s left of downtown, they take over existing structures and give them an exotic twist,” Marshall wrote.
In the story, Marshall vividly captured the chaotic fervor inside the Ba Le Sandwich shop (about where the Island Taste restaurant is now) and also the former Red Barn franchise (right where the City Hall tower is now) that was converted into yet another Vietnamese restaurant.
“It’s the perfect meeting of Vietnamese culture—the splendid food—and American tack—the gaudy red barn and the wagon-wheel decor inside,” he wrote.
A side note: around 1991, in a textbook San Jose sequence of events, the old Red Barn restaurant building was torn down and replaced with a Taco Bell, which was then torn down when City Hall went up in 2005.
But back to Marshall’s amazing story, in which he even interviewed the proprietor of the now-long-gone Lee’s Tailoring on Third Street. Marshall nailed the incredible work ethic of Vietnamese refugees and their desire to help revitalize a crumbling neighborhood, right before the era of redevelopment would then push out the very Vietnamese who gave life to the area.
Of the Vietnamese refugees in 1983, Marshall wrote:
“Their confidence in downtown’s future should gratify local officials and it should also teach us all a lesson. When city planners and politicians measure the future of downtown by the number of tall new office buildings, grand hotels, and convention centers, remember that there’s another side to what makes a city liveable.”
In those days, San Jose had zero name recognition. Marshall could see how the Vietnamese were transforming the city’s downtown core.
“The Vietnamese add color and diversity to their drab surroundings,” Marshall wrote. “San Joseans will someday come to treasure their presence in the city’s center. It’s part of what makes San Jose more than just a misbegotten splotch on the map.”
Now, more than 40 years later, all the businesses Marshall mentioned in his story are gone.
