San Jose, California

San Jose (; meaning St. Joseph in Spanish) is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the United States, and the county seat of Santa Clara County. It is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. The San Jose/Silicon Valley area is a major component of the greater San Francisco Bay Area Combined Statistical Area (CSA), a region of nearly 7.4 million people.

Once a small farming city, San Jose experienced rapid growth from the 1950s to the present. San Jose is now the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area in terms of population, land area, and industrial development. The US Census Bureau estimated the population at 964,695 as of 2009.

San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California, which later became Alta California. The city served as a farming community to support Spanish military installations at San Francisco and Monterey. When California gained statehood in 1850, San Jose served as its first capital.

After more than 150 years as an agricultural center, San Jose experienced increased demand for housing from soldiers and veterans returning from World War II. San Jose continued its aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s by annexing more land area. The rapid growth of the high technology and electronics industries further accelerated the transistion from an agricultural center, to an urbanized metropolitan area.

The Santa Clara Valley was the last (and largest) contiguous area of undeveloped land surrounding the San Francisco Bay. By the 1990s, San Jose's location within the booming local technology industry earned the city its nickname, Capital of Silicon Valley.

History

Prior to European settlement, the area was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans The first lasting European presence began with a series of Franciscan missions established from 1769 by Father Junípero Serra. On orders from Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, Spanish Viceroy of New Spain, San Jose was founded by Lieutenant José Joaquín Moraga as Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe (in honor of Saint Joseph) on November 29, 1777, to establish a farming community. The town was the first civil settlement in Alta California.

In 1797, the pueblo was moved from its original location, near the present-day intersection of Guadalupe Parkway and Taylor Street, to a location in what is now Downtown San Jose. San Jose came under Mexican rule in 1821 after Mexico broke with the Spanish crown. It then became part of the United States, after it capitulated in 1846 and California was annexed. and the San Jose High School's three-story stone-and-brick building was also destroyed. The period during World War II was a tumultuous time. Japanese Americans primarily from Japantown were sent to internment camps, including the future mayor, Norman Mineta. Following the Los Angeles zoot suit riots, anti-Mexican violence took place during the summer of 1943. The entire region prepared for the beginning of the war.

As World War II started, the city's economy shifted from agriculture (the Del Monte cannery was the largest employer) to industrial manufacturing with the contracting of the Food Machinery Corporation (later known as FMC Corporation) by the United States War Department to build 1000 Landing Vehicle Tracked. After World War II, FMC (later United Defense, and currently BAE Systems) continued as a defense contractor, with the San Jose facilities designing and manufacturing military platforms such as the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and various subsystems of the M1 Abrams. IBM established its West Coast headquarters in San Jose in 1943 and opened a downtown research and development facility in 1952. Both would prove to be harbingers for the economy of San Jose, as Reynold Johnson and his team would later invent RAMAC, as well as the Hard disk drive, and the technological side of San Jose's economy grew.

During the 1950s and 1960s, city manager Dutch Hamann led the city in a major growth campaign. The city annexed adjacent areas, such as Alviso and Cambrian Park, providing large areas for suburbs. An anti-growth reaction to the effects of rapid development emerged in the 1970s championed by mayors Norman Mineta and Janet Gray Hayes. Despite establishing an urban growth boundary, development fees, and incorporations of Campbell and Cupertino, development was not slowed, but rather directed into already incorporated areas. Efforts to increase density continued into 1990s when an update of the 1974 urban plan kept the urban growth boundaries intact and voters rejected a ballot measure to ease development restrictions in the foothills. Sixty percent of the housing built in San Jose since 1980 and over three-quarters of the housing built since 2000 have been multifamily structures, reflecting a political propensity toward Smart Growth planning principles.

Name

Geography

San Jose is located at .

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 178.2 square miles (461.5 km²), of which 3.3 square miles (8.6 km²; 1.86%) is water.

San Jose lies between the San Andreas Fault, the source of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the Calaveras Fault. San Jose is shaken by moderate earthquakes, above four on the Richter Scale, on average of one to two times a year. These quakes originate just east of the city on the creeping section of the Calaveras Fault, which is a major source of earthquake activity in Northern California. On April 14, 1984, at 1:15 PM, local time a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck the Calaveras Fault near San Jose's Mount Hamilton. The most serious earthquake, in 1906, damaged many buildings in San Jose as described earlier. Earlier significant quakes rocked the city in 1839, 1851, 1858, 1864, 1865, 1868, and 1891. The Daly City Earthquake of 1957 caused some damage. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 also did some damage to parts of the city. The other faults near San Jose are the Monte Vista Faultand the Hayward Fault Zone.

The Guadalupe River runs from the Santa Cruz Mountains (which separate the South Bay from the Pacific Coast) flowing north through San Jose, ending in the San Francisco Bay at Alviso. Along the southern part of the river is the neighborhood of Almaden Valley, originally named for the mercury mines which produced mercury needed for gold extraction from quartz during the California Gold Rush as well as mercury fulminate blasting caps and detonators for the U.S. military from 1870 to 1945.

The lowest point in San Jose is 13 feet (4 m) below sea level at the San Francisco Bay in Alviso; the highest is 4,372 feet (1,333 m) at Copernicus Peak, Mount Hamilton, which is technically outside the city limit. Due to the proximity to Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, San Jose has taken several steps to reduce light pollution, including replacing all street lamps and outdoor lighting in private developments with low pressure sodium lamps. To recognize the city's efforts, the asteroid 6216 San Jose was named after the city.

San Jose lies close to the Pacific Ocean and close to San Francisco Bay (a small portion of its northern border touches the bay). Santa Clara Valley is the population center of the Bay Area, and like the hub and spokes of a wheel, surrounding communities emanate outwards from the valley. This growth in part, has shaped the greater Bay Area as it is today in terms of geographic population distribution and the trend of suburbanization away from the valley.

There are four distinct valleys in the city of San Jose which include: Almaden Valley, situated on the south-west fringe of the city; Evergreen Valley to the south-east, which is hilly all through-out its interior; Santa Clara Valley, which includes the flat, main urban expanse of the South Bay; and the rural Coyote Valley, to the city's extreme southern fringe.

Climate

January's average high is 59°F and average low is 42°F. July's average high is 84°F and average low is 57°F. The highest temperature ever recorded in San Jose was 112°F on July 19–23, 2006; the lowest was 20°F (−8.3°C) in December, 1990. Temperature fluctuations between night and day can vary as little as 10°F to 12°F (a fluctuation range of 5.5°C to 6.6°C), meaning that its climate does not experience huge temperature drops or rises like some other parts of California.

With the light rainfall, San Jose and its suburbs experience about 300 full or partly sunny days a year. Rain occurs primarily in the months from November through April or May. During the winter and spring, hillsides and fields turn green with grasses and vegetation, although deciduous trees are few. With the coming of the annual hot summer dry period, the vegetation dies and dries, giving the hills a golden cover, which unfortunately also provides fuel for frequent grass fires.

Measurable precipitation falls in downtown San Jose on an average of 50 days a year. Annual precipitation has ranged from in 1953 to in 1983. The most precipitation in one month was in February 1998. The maximum 24-hour rainfall was on January 30, 1968. Although summer is normally quite dry in San Jose, a very heavy thunderstorm on August 21, 1968, brought 1.92 inch of rain, causing some flooding.

The snow level drops as low as 2,000 ft (610 m) above sea level, or lower, occasionally coating nearby Mount Hamilton, and less frequently the Santa Cruz Mountains, with snow that normally lasts a few days. This sometimes snarls traffic traveling on State Route 17 towards Santa Cruz. Snow occasionally falls in San Jose, but until recently, the most recent snow to remain on the ground was on February 5, 1976, when many residents around the city saw as much as 3 inches (7.6 cm) on car and roof tops. The official observation station measured only of snow. However, in March 2006, a smaller amount, up to one inch (2.5 cm) of snow fell in downtown San Jose as well as other areas around the city at elevations of only 90 feet (27 m) to 200 feet (61 m) above sea level.

Like most of the Bay Area, San Jose is made up of dozens of microclimates. Downtown San Jose experiences the lightest rainfall in the city, while South San Jose, only 10 miles (16 km) distant, experiences more rainfall and somewhat more extreme temperatures.

Cityscape

The city is divided into several geographical regions. Many of these regions were originally unincorporated communities or separate municipalities that were later annexed by the city. The city is generally divided into the following areas: Downtown San Jose, Central, West San Jose, North San Jose, East San Jose, and South San Jose.

Some well-known communities within San Jose include Downtown San Jose, Japantown, Rose Garden, Sunol-Midtown, Willow Glen, Naglee Park, Burbank, West San Jose, Winchester, Alviso, East Foothills, Alum Rock, Little Portugal, Blossom Valley, Cambrian, Almaden Valley, Silver Creek Valley, Evergreen Valley, Edenvale, Santa Teresa, Seven Trees, Coyote Valley.

Landmarks

Demographics

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Category:Cities in the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Populated places in Santa Clara County, California Category:County seats in California California Category:Neighborhoods in San Jose, California Category:Populated places established in 1777 Category:Cities in California