Schmap San Jose and Silicon Valley Historical Background

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San Jose and Silicon Valley - Historical Background
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San Jose and Silicon Valley Home
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Before the silicon chip, before Dionne Warwick ("Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", and well before the Spanish gave it a name, San Jose was home to scattered settlements of Ohlone Indians. The Ohlone ("The People") were hunter-gatherers who had lived around San Francisco Bay since the end of the last Ice Age. The southern end of the Bay, where bustling San Jose now stands, provided the Ohlones with an particularly felicitous mix of mild climate, redwood forests, acorn-filled oak groves, and creeks and bay wetlands abounding with fish and wildlife.

Fortuitous Mistake

On November 6, 1769, Gaspar de Portola walked into the Ohlone's peaceful world by mistake. Portola was looking for Monterey Bay, discovered (in 1602), and subsequently described with wild inaccuracy, by Sebastian Vizcaino. It would take Portola two expeditions to find it. On this first mission, he became the first European to lay eyes on San Francisco Bay, and on the Ohlone. (Portola set up camp to the north under a tall redwood, a place he called el palo alto. The tree, and its namesake city, are both thriving today.)

Early Development

In 1775, Juan Batista de Anza arrived in the area with a number of Spaniards intent on settling the territory of Alta California, and civilizing the Ohlone. In two years, a mission was built on a site close to the Guadalupe River, dubbed Mission Santa Clara de Asis (after Saint Claire of Assisi). The area around the settlement came to be known as Santa Clara Valley. (Today, San Jose is the seat of Santa Clara County.) To maintain the mission, an agricultural outpost was founded nearby on November 29, 1777: El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, so called after St. Joseph, the patron saint of the territory. Because this was the first civilian lay presence in Alta California, San Jose can claim the title of the oldest city in the state. Spanish settlers planted vineyards and orchards and developed cattle ranches. The Ohlone learned agriculture, were absorbed into the burgeoning Spanish community, and ceased to exist as a distinct culture.

Battle of Santa Clara

The year 1821 marked the Mexican Revolution and a change in the administration of Alta California. A period of tension between Mexico and the United States followed, as the American frontier pushed ever westward, culminating in 1846 with the Mexican-American War. The Santa Clara Valley saw the only action between United States and Mexicans (or, more precisely Californios) in Northern California, in fact, at the Battle of Santa Clara.

The Gold Rush Days

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 had a profound effect on San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley. While not a vein of the "mother lode" that ran far south, the Valley's western foothills were rich in cinnabar, an ore containing mercury and sulfur, both valuable minerals important for the refinement of gold and silver. The Valley's agricultural, industrial and mercantile resources, which fed and clothed miners up at the diggings, also played an important role in bringing prosperity to San Jose. In 1850, two years after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, California won statehood; thanks in large part to the determined lobbying efforts of two local real estate promoters, and San Jose became the state's first capital. In its year in San Jose (a hard, rainy winter would drive the capital to Benecia, Vallejo, and finally Sacramento), the hard-living State Assembly was known as "the Legislature of a Thousand Drinks".

Agricultural Heritage

As the gold rush ran its course and gave way to the silver bonanza of the Comstock Lode, miners came by the thousands to settle in the pleasant climate and fertile land of Santa Clara Valley. As the state grew, so did the Valley's agricultural bounty of wheat, pears, apricots, cherries, plums, and finally, and most significantly, prunes. It was the prune industry that came to dominate Santa Clara Valley. San Jose's agricultural heritage has been largely plowed under by the demands of housing and the technology industry, but individual trees and small stands can be seen here and there within city limits. The bulk of California's fruit growing takes place to the east, in the San Joaquin Valley.

Immigrants

Farming and the railroad increased both the population and the ethnic diversity of San Jose. Germans played a key role in city government and civic life, and a local German band was the nucleus for what is now the San Jose Symphony. French immigrants helped shape the fruit industry with expertise and cuttings from the French countryside. And by 1870, more than a third of the city's population was Chinese. (In 1877, a suspicious fire burned down most of the wooden shacks and shanties that made up San Jose's Chinatown.)

Santa Clara Valley continued to prosper quietly throughout the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the occasional disturbances of the 1906 San Andreas earthquake and the Great Depression. In 1891, railroad baron Leland Stanford's largesse made possible the opening of Stanford University in Palo Alto (the town -- in Santa Clara County -- actually sprang up in the shadow of the university, and was subsequently named for Portola's redwood).

Stanford University

Stanford quickly became a leading center of education and research, particularly in the development of new technologies. In 1909, Stanford engineering graduate Cyril Elwell, funded with $500 of seed capital from the university's president, began work in wireless technology that would result in the founding of the Federal Telegraph Company in Palo Alto. Also in 1909, Stanford researcher Charles Herrold broadcast the world's first commercial radio broadcasts from atop San Jose's Garden City Bank building. Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard started a small audio-oscillator business in their garage in the 1930s and are popularly credited with fathering what we now know as Silicon Valley. In truth, the South Bay's high-tech industry was the legacy of a number of brilliant engineers and technologists associated with the university and Palo Alto business community.

Hub of Hi-tech

After the World War II, tens of thousands of veterans made San Jose their home, displacing agriculture and changing the nature of the city, a change that would become even more dramatic with the wartime technology that followed. The exigencies of war had sparked the accelerated development of vacuum tube, radio, and radar technology, and led to the founding of the Stanford Research Institute. In far off Pennsylvania, the birth of the world's first electronic computer, ENIAC, led to IBM building a $53 million disk drive plant in San Jose. Lockheed, GTE, General Electric, a more mature Hewlett-Packard and Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory (whose founder, William Shockley, had invented the transistor) soon followed. The area was by the late 1950s the center of the nation's technology industry.

Disaffected Shockley employees founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which developed the first practical integrated circuit, or silicon chip as it came to be known. In 1968, refugees of struggling Fairchild went on to form the Intel Corporation, which, in 1971, came out with the microprocessor. In quick succession, video games (starting with Atari's Pong), PostScript printing technology, Cupertino's Apple Computer, the IBM PC, and Sun Microsystems helped to make up Silicon Valley as we know it today.

Urban Development

Having annexed numerous surrounding communities after the war, San Jose's population, helped by the returning GIs, quickly tripled in size. (City Manager A. P. Dutch Hamann directed the annexation campaign, helped by a ruthless staff derided as "the Panzer Division".) The expenditure of valuable municipal resources in the city's rapid expansion had a profound and negative effect on the city's center. By the late '50s, it started a not-so-gradual decline into urban blight, which was reversed only in the mid-1980s under the stewardship of Mayor Thomas McEnery. An extensive and expensive redevelopment of downtown San Jose saw the construction of several new museums, the San Jose Arena (home of the San Jose Sharks hockey team), first-class hotels, and the San Jose McEnry Convention Center, along with a light rail mass transit system linking downtown San Jose with surrounding suburbs and Silicon Valley cities.

Capital of Silicon Valley

Today the most recognizable and certainly the largest of Silicon Valley's prosperous communities, San Jose declared itself "the Capital of Silicon Valley" in the late 1980s. It had become the 11th-largest city in the country (with a recently estimated population of 867,675, 120,000 more than San Francisco, its more glamorous northern neighbor). Along with its size and its stature as a job magnet, however, has come a slew of new problems, like urban sprawl, congestion and social services distribution more often associated with Los Angeles.

Economic Tremor

Having put itself back together after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, San Jose now faces an economic tremor. The recent downturn in the suddenly old "New Economy," with its consequent shakeout in Internet-connected businesses, has of course had its impact. But the city's economic diversity including aerospace and diversified consumer electronics technologies, industrial manufacturing, and agricultural processing and distribution, has for the most part kept it a humming industrial engine.

Ethnic Diversity

San Jose's ethnic diversity is even more striking, with large and vital Latino, Indian and Southeast Asian populations (who are making increasingly significant contributions to the high-tech industry). A tour through San Jose's neighborhoods reveals a rich mosaic of culture and cuisine. San Jose's museums and performing arts, as well, have become some of California's finest as the city's cultural influence rises to match its economic stature.

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Cupertino

San Jose and Silicon Valley
United States

Campbell and Cupertino are nestled between the borders of San Jose, Los Gatos and Saratoga. Each has a distinct downtown commercial district, but remain mostly residential communities. People who move here tend to have children: the Cupertino School District is one of the best in the county. Cupertino is famous as the world headquarters of Apple Computer.

Review © 2007, Wcities

Photo: Arlette Thibodeau

Downtown San Jose

San Jose and Silicon Valley
United States
An extensive 1980s facelift gave formerly downtrodden downtown San Jose a spate of five-star hotels and museums, a convention center, and an arena on par with any in America. All that was needed was a bit of refinement in the go-go '90s to give it the cosmopolitan air of a world-class city. Thriving, sophisticated, and unquestionably moneyed, downtown feels (if only because the rest of Silicon Valley is so decentralized) like the capital of Silicon Valley. Looking out over the Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park, The Fairmont Hotel reigns over a bevy of beautiful luxury hotels; nearby are the stately Hyatt Sainte Claire and Hotel DeAnza. The very number of popular bars and restaurants presents a challenge to the visitor. The galleries, coffeehouses and theaters of the SoFA (South of First Street) district give downtown a bit of SoMa/SoHo urban chic.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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Intel Museum

Silicon Valley history 2200 Mission College Boulevard
(at the corner of Freedom Circle)
San Jose and Silicon Valley, CA 95052
United States
+1 408 765 0503
http://www.intel.com/intel/int... Is there a better place than Silicon Valley to learn about the history of hi-tech and its impact on the Bay Area and the world? Not likely. This museum offers not only a history of the Intel Corporation and Silicon Valley, it also displays interesting exhibits on how chips, microprocessors and memory technology all work together. Learn about semiconductors, chip design, fabrication and packaging. Group tours are available. The gift shop is an excellent spot to find mementos from Silicon Valley.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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Palo Alto

San Jose and Silicon Valley
United States
Palo Alto, in San Mateo County, must be mentioned in any discussion of Silicon Valley, primarily because of Stanford University. One of the state's premier universities (its perennial arch-rival, Cal, is to the northeast in Berkeley), Stanford is really the cradle of the high-technology industry that grew up into contemporary Silicon Valley. Stanford Research Park, on Page Mill Road, the world's first industrial park, is part of a long, close and successful relationship between the university and the electronics industry. The main Stanford campus is attractive and spacious. Palo Alto today is upmarket, upscale, and expensive, but it's a great place to shop. With the trendiness of the college crowd and the taste of moneyed yuppies, the stores and excellent restaurants of well-scrubbed University Avenue always draw steady stream shoppers late into the evening.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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San Jose McEnery Convention Center

For meeting planners 150 W. San Carlos Street
Between Almaden Boulevard and Market Street
San Jose and Silicon Valley, CA 95113
United States
+1 408 277 5277
http://www.sjcc.com/ Named after former mayor Tom McEnery, this sleek and thoroughly modern convention center continues to be one of the prime locations for event planners in the South Bay area. It is a versatile place with huge spaces for exhibits, banquets, and meetings of any kind. Many hotels are in the immediate vicinity, and the center is within walking distance of most of the great restaurants that downtown San Jose has to offer. Note: Credit card acceptance varies by event.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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San Jose Sharks

The teal boys 525 West Santa Clara St
(at Montgomery)
San Jose and Silicon Valley, CA 95113
United States
+1 408 998 8497
http://www.sj-sharks.com/ Founded in 1991, the Sharks have developed a strong fan base in San Jose. Its games continue to sell out, no matter what its record is. Hockey season is from October to April. A variety of ticket packages are offered, from individual tickets that start around USD20 to more extensive (and expensive) group packages. See their website for further information.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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Silicon Valley

San Jose and Silicon Valley
United States
This famed portion of California is located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally dubbed "Silicon Valley" because of the large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers in the area, the name stuck and today represents the multitude of technological corporations doing business there. Considered the home-base for the recent dot-com revolution, the Valley is now dominated by internet and computer-oriented businesses. Thirty-two of the Fortune 500 companies are located in the Valley, including Google, Yahoo! and eBay. It is also a bustling university town, home to top-notch schools such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon (west coast campus), San Jose State, and Santa Clara.

Review © 2007, Wcities

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