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San Jose travel guide

about San Jose

San Jose is a major city in California, USA, and the county seat of Santa Clara County. In the 1970s, the city council officially adopted San José as the spelling for the city name, although it is still more commonly spelled San Jose. The city is located at the south end of the San Francisco Bay, within the informal boundaries of Silicon Valley. As of 2003, it reported an estimated population of 925,000, making it the most populous city in Northern California and third in the state after Los Angeles and San Diego. It is the eleventh largest city in the United States.

San Jose geography

San Jose is located at 37°18'15" North, 121°52'22" West (37.304051, −121.872734)¹.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 461.5 km² (178.2 mi²). 452.9 km² (174.9 mi²) of it is land and 8.6 km² (3.3 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 1.86% water.

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. The river is the home to the only known salmon spawning run through a major U.S. downtown area. 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 at sea level at the San Francisco Bay in Alviso, the highest is 4,372 feet at Copernicus Peak, Mount Hamilton. 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 with low pressure sodium lamps. To recognize the city's efforts, the asteroid 6216 San Jose was named after the city.

San Jose history

For thousands of years prior to the arrival of European settlers, the area now known as San Jose was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans.

El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe was founded by José Joaquin Moraga on November 29, 1777, the first settlement not associated with a mission or a military post in Alta California. (The nearest mission, Mission Santa Clara de Asis, was founded earlier in 1777, three miles from the original pueblo site in neighboring Santa Clara. Mission San José de Guadalupe wasn't founded until 1797, about 20 miles north of San Jose in what is now Fremont). The town was founded as a farming community to provide food for the presidios of San Francisco and Monterey. In 1778 the pueblo had a population of 68. 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, surrounding Pueblo Plaza (now Plaza de Céasar Chávez).

During the Bear Flag Revolt, Captain Thomas Fallon led a small force from Santa Cruz and captured the pueblo without bloodshead on July 11, 1846. Fallon recieved an American flag from John D. Sloat, and raised it over the pueblo on July 14, as the California Republic agreed to join the United States following the start of the Mexican-American War. Fallon would later become the seventh mayor of San Jose.

On March 27, 1850, San Jose became the first incorporated city in the U.S. state of California. It also served as the state's first capital with the first and second sessions of the California Legislature being held there in 1850 and 1851.

For nearly two centuries a farming community, San Jose produced a significant amount of fruits and vegetables until the 1960s, and many past and current names of teams, streets, buildings, and so on reflect its agricultural beginnings. Prunes were one of the largest crops, and this dried fruit's name commonly appears.

During the California Gold Rush period, the New Almaden Mines just south of the city were the largest mercury mines in North America (mercury was used to help separate gold from ore). The importance of the mercury industry at the time explains why the local newspaper was named the Mercury News.

A. P. Hamann (nicknamed "Dutch") became city manager in 1950. At the time, the city had a population of 95,000 and a total area of only 17 mi². Hamann instituted an aggressive growth program by annexation of adjacent areas, such as Alviso, Cambrian Park and other neighborhoods, and a program of dispersed urbanization, sometimes called los angelization, resulting in an annual growth rate of over 8 percent. When Hamann left office in 1969, San Jose had grown to 495,000 residents and 136 mi².

Following Hamann's retirement, antigrowth city councils came to power, cemented in the 1971 election of Norman Mineta as mayor. Under Mineta, the city adopted the "General Plan" that restricted development of land inside the incorporated area of San Jose and banned development in an additional 200 mi² east and south of the city, an area known as San Jose's sphere of influence. To the west, communities such as Campbell and Cupertino had incorporated as cities to avoid being annexed to San Jose, while expansion to the north was impossible because of San Francisco Bay. The result was that there was no land available to build housing. The plan's goal was to bring population growth down to a more manageable level.

However, with the boom of the electronics industry, specifically personal computers and integrated circuits, San Jose and the surrounding areas' population continued growing at high rates. By 1980, the city's population was 630,000; it reached 782,000 by 1990; and 894,943 by 2000—at which point Santa Clara County as a whole had 1,682,585 residents. However, the city council passed another General Plan in 1994 with the original 1974 urban growth boundaries intact. As a result, housing costs in San Jose and the rest of the Bay Area rose faster than the national average in the 1980s and 1990s, with San Jose's housing cost increasing by 936 percent between 1976 and 2001, the fastest growth in the nation over that time. The average 2003 home price in Santa Clara County was approximately 330 percent of the national average.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "San Jose, California".

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