Drifting Through the San Jose Fairmont's Past and Present

""On California St., time and traffic signals stand still as a cable car rattles into the past it never left." Then he mentions "a slice of the Fairmont, with its endless double-parked tour buses and trucks" and "the beautiful, open-faced facade of the Mark Hopkins, the Beaux Arts charms of 1001 California and the Huntington's parapets, Grace Cathedral's carillon showering silvery notes across Huntington Park.""

""In downtown San Jose, where I scroll through these words, I am right smack in the middle of a neighborhood that gets created and destroyed over and over again, so there is no such period piece. We're lucky that developers haven't smashed St. Joseph's Cathedral and replaced it with a data center. As such, I cannot separate the current moment from the days when the San Jose Fairmont was under construction.""

A diner at Poppy & Claro checks social media while waiting for pizza and encounters a Herb Caen passage describing Nob Hill and the Fairmont. Caen's lines evoke cable cars, double-parked tour buses, Beaux Arts facades, and Grace Cathedral's carillon. The narrator contrasts Caen's San Francisco period piece with downtown San Jose, where neighborhoods are repeatedly created and destroyed. The piece notes that developers did not replace St. Joseph's Cathedral with a data center. The San Jose Fairmont rose beginning around 1986, accompanied by the Knight-Ridder Building, now called 50 West because of its address.

Read at Metro Silicon Valley | Silicon Valley's Leading Weekly