Willow Glen has one of the more unusual civic histories in San Jose. Residents incorporated it as its own city in 1927 specifically to block a Southern Pacific Railroad line from running through the area, and the fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before Willow Glen won. The independent city lasted…
West San Jose, the area bounded roughly by Stevens Creek Boulevard, Highway 17, Highway 85, and De Anza Boulevard, filled in almost entirely during a single postwar wave. Most of its homes went up in the 1950s as moderately priced tract housing, and the Westgate Shopping Center opened in 1960 as one of the area’s…
Evergreen’s history runs deeper than most East San Jose neighborhoods. The land was originally part of Rancho Yerba Buena, a Mexican-era land grant to Antonio Chaboya, and stayed in orchards and vineyards for well over a century before the postwar suburban build-out reached the base of the Diablo Range foothills. That long, uneven development timeline…
Blossom Hill’s tree-lined streets are one of the clearest reminders in South San Jose that the neighborhood was orchard land before it was rooftops. Most of the homes here went up in a single, fairly compact building boom, which makes the plumbing picture more predictable than in older parts of the city, but not one…
Berryessa’s streets sit on what used to be some of the densest orchard land in the Santa Clara Valley. That agricultural past shapes the neighborhood’s housing stock more than most homeowners realize, and it is a big part of what a plumber looks for before starting a whole-house repipe here. Does Berryessa Require a Permit…
Alviso has one of the most unusual housing histories in San Jose. It was its own incorporated town before San Jose existed as we know it today, and it was not annexed into the city until 1968. That history shows up directly in the pipes running through Alviso homes, which makes knowing what is behind…
Lexington Hills is an unincorporated mountain community in western Santa Clara County, tucked into the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos around Lexington Reservoir. The area takes its name from the town of Lexington, a sawmill settlement built in 1848 by Isaac Branham and Julian Jank and later renamed in 1860 by landowner John P….
Saratoga began in 1847 as a sawmill settlement built by William Campbell, and by 1851 Martin McCarthy had built a toll road down to the valley and renamed the growing town Toll Gate. A furniture factory, grist mill, tannery, and paper mill followed, and after mineral springs were discovered in the 1850s the town took…
Morgan Hill takes its name from Hiram Morgan Hill, who in 1884 built Villa Mira Monte as a weekend home after marrying Diana Murphy, whose family had held the surrounding ranch land since the Mexican land-grant era. In 1892 he hired a land developer to subdivide and sell most of that ranch, laying the groundwork…
San Lorenzo Village was one of the first large-scale planned communities built in Alameda County. In 1944, under contract to the U.S. Navy, developer David D. Bohannon began building the neighborhood using an assembly-line “California Method” of home construction, completing around 1,500 houses in roughly 500 days to house Bay Area shipyard and war-industry workers….
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