Ghosts of Muji, the Cinequest VIP Lounge and Pic-a-Dilly Fine Food are watching over the jackhammers.

When I hear construction noise inside an abandoned Japanese retailer that only existed because a hotel was moved 186 feet down the street so that a newer hotel could expand in its place, an expansion that later also failed and was then saved by a university to house students, I can only be in San Jose.

The southwest corner of First Street and what’s now called Paseo de San Antonio, the ground-level corner of the former Fairmont Annex, has been vacant for years, ever since Muji shut its doors. 

Muji originally opened in 2013, to major fanfare. It seemed like every developer and real estate broker in San Jose was there. Multiple news cameras arrived for the occasion. After many years of downtown retail failure, San Jose had become the only city on earth where the opening of one store constituted a major news story. So that’s what happened.

Unfortunately, seven years later, the pandemic forced Muji to close, so the space went vacant yet again. C’est la vie.

For a couple years before this, in 2011 and 2012, Cinequest used the same space for its VIP Lounge during the film festival—yet another example of arts intelligentsia converting abandonment into creativity.

The building in question came into being in the early aughts after Fairmont owner Lew Wolff demanded the city give him millions to add an additional annex to the hotel, which required relocating another structure that stood in the way—the defunct Hotel Montgomery. San Jose was an attention-starved city, desperate for any possible name recognition, anything to “put us on the map,” so if Lew Wolff wanted more hotel rooms, the city was happy to oblige.

Originally San Jose’s most lavish accommodation when it opened in 1911, the Montgomery had long since fallen into neglect and disrepair. In a highly publicized and contentious adventure, the city literally picked up the building and moved it 186 feet down First Street so Lew Wolff could then build his Fairmont extension, while the Montgomery then underwent costly restoration. Only in San Jose would such absurdity take place.

Nowadays, any native who looks at the current incarnation of the old Fairmont Annex—the building that now includes SJSU student housing, Bijan Bakery and maybe a new tenant on the corner—will remember that corner as the original location of the old Hotel Montgomery.

As a wandering Zen-adjacent scholar inspired by ancient ruins, I’m more interested in the endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth, which tend to happen at every single corner around here. When I heard the jackhammers signaling the possible arrival of a new tenant, my gaze went straight back to some old photos of the same corner, when the Montgomery was still there.

A fabulous shot from the late ’60s depicts the hotel in all its faded glory, after it morphed into an $80-a-month flophouse. The despair is inspiring. Facing First Street, we see Guttman’s, a boarded-up women’s clothing store, plus Squires Restaurant, likewise shuttered. On the corner, we can spot “budget dinner plates” at Pic-a-Dilly Fine Food. An optometrist office appears in the middle. At the southern end is the Skol Room, the hotel’s cocktail lounge.

The Skol Room was owned by Nate Wasserman, the same guy that opened the Branham Lounge in 1969. But that’s a different column.

Much of downtown at this time looked similar: retail struggling to survive as the neighborhood deteriorated; transient hotels, dive bars and worn-out steakhouses; medical and legal offices inside peeling mid-rises. Yet up the block remained Orange Julius, See’s Candies, Frederick’s of Hollywood, a crumbling Montgomery Ward department store and the Sapphire Lounge—also another future column.

But this is not about the past. Ultimately, I am after beauty in the mundane. I am experiencing the ongoing cycle of births, deaths and reincarnations, this time at the southwest corner of First and San Antonio. When I sit inside Bijan Bakery and see the SJSU WiFi appear on my laptop, and I see the flow of students leaving the building on their way to school, I see nothing but beauty, and I am content in the present moment.

How many bookstores around here can last 70 years? We’re about to find out.

On Saturday, Sept. 20, Kepler’s in Menlo Park celebrates its 70th anniversary with a block party from 2 to 5pm. Since I wrote a column on this page for the 50th anniversary and then another for the 60th anniversary, there is no possible way for me to separate the journey of this column from the story of Kepler’s, especially since it all started long before I was even born, that is, if one even believes in absolute beginnings.

At the Kepler’s 50th anniversary party, several dynamics all came together in glorious fashion. The event featured live music, raffles, games, prizes and book bags filled with the best books from the last five decades. For the raffle, I sat right next to Joan Baez. I didn’t even realize it was her until she bagged one of the prizes.

You see, Baez was, and still is, one of many heroic individuals whose stories are likewise inseparable from the journey of Kepler’s bookstore. Others include the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand and Steve Wozniak.

So where did it all start? Well, Roy Kepler first opened the place in May of 1955. It seems odd now, but back in the ’50s, most publishers, as well as the general public, didn’t consider paperbacks to be “real” books. The entire concept of peddling texts in cheap paperbound volumes was a radical affront to the publishing trade. Roy Kepler, along with Fred and Pat Cody in Berkeley, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco, changed all of that. Bay Area bookstores became the leaders of the “paperback revolution,” as it came to be called. It could only have happened in Northern California.

A World War II conscientious objector, Kepler also helped spearhead the American peace movement for decades, spending his entire adult life opposing violence. In 1960, Roy and others were arrested at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory for protesting against nuclear weapons. And that wasn’t the only time the authorities carried him away.

Kepler’s became a catch-all for every outcast imaginable. Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Pigpen of the Grateful Dead supposedly first met each other while loitering around Kepler’s and making a racket. When Ken Kesey needed someone to drive the Merry Prankster bus, he dispatched Neal Cassady straight from Kepler’s to plot the cross-country spectacle. Hitchhikers often stopped by Kepler’s on their way up and down the coast. It was a central focal point for bohemians who weren’t welcome anywhere else. Baez and her pacifist guru Ira Sandperl became regulars, with Sandperl manning the register for decades. As the legend goes, Kepler’s was the first place to stock both Playboy and the Paris Review right next to each other. Steve Wozniak and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand have both cited Kepler’s as a place integral to their youth.

Over the years, controversy arrived in all shapes and forms. During the Vietnam era, when a second store existed in Los Altos, violent right-wingers who needed an enemy tossed a bomb through the window. In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on author Salman Rushdie, prompting bookstores everywhere to remove The Satanic Verses from their shelves. Kepler’s did no such thing. Instead, the store organized a public reading from the book by Ira Sandperl. Baez performed just for the occasion.

At the 50th anniversary party in 2005, I picked up a 27-page orange-colored pamphlet, “Kepler’s: 50 Years of Independent Bookselling,” written by journalist Michael Doyle. One dollar of each purchase went to the Resource Center for Non-violence. At the time, Doyle was collecting memories and much of the pamphlet later wound up in his 2012 hardback volume, Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution.

By the time the Kepler’s 60th anniversary party rolled around in 2015, Radical Chapters was for sale and I bought a copy at the party. I still have the hardback and the original 27-page pamphlet. At that party, everyone was also given a name tag with space to write down how long they’d been shopping at Kepler’s. I put “forever.”

This weekend, the 70th anniversary party will yet again cement Kepler’s in the annals of history. Long live the revolution!

Nearly 40,000 students are enrolled at SJSU this year. All of them should attend Heather David’s campus tour of modernist architecture on Sept. 20.

With so many mid-century buildings still populating the campus, David spent hours of her own time researching the history of each building, its architect and the various movements and schools represented. Many campus employees who see these structures every day probably don’t even think about these things. The tour is sponsored by the Preservation Action Council San Jose (PAC*SJ), and tickets are available on the PAC*SJ website.

For instance, according to David’s research, the Music Building was built in 1953 from earlier designs by architect Stanton Willard. Hugh Gillis Hall came along in 1954, thanks to Ralph Wyckoff, and the Administration Building in 1957, thanks to Anson Boyd. Local architect Allan Walter designed Joe West Hall in 1968. The Faculty Offices, aka where the English professors hang out, was concocted by Harold C. Guilkey and Associates in 1958. The Art Building arrived thanks to Stone, Mulloy, Marraccini and Patterson architects, in 1959.

“I have come away from this investigation with a much deeper appreciation for San Jose State,” David told me. “The campus feels way more intimate and relatable to me than, let’s say, a Berkeley or Stanford. And because so many buildings went up in the ’50s and ’60s, it really is a fantastic place to explore modernism—from Bauhaus to Brutalism.”

David’s obsession, I mean specialty, however, is mid-century modernism. She already wrote books about roadside motels and Bay Area kitsch. Thousands have viewed her Flickr page. Which is why Duncan Hall, MacQuarrie Hall and others like it on campus attracted her attention.

Duncan Hall in particular brings back memories for many people. Back in the ’60s, though, the Spartan Daily bashed the building in print, calling it a $3 million catastrophe. Water dripped from the ceiling. The elevators skipped floors. The power went out. Students weren’t muscular enough to handle the thick glass doors.

At the time, San Jose was still a backwater fruit-packing suburb, so many students, staff and faculty didn’t understand the big-city ambitions of a real urban university. In fact, San Jose State wasn’t even called a university at the time. It was named San Jose State College. The monolithic Duncan Hall was considered futuristic.

“Most of the articles I found criticizing the modern buildings focus on the functionality of the buildings, many of which were erected with limited budgets and at warp speed,” said David. “I took all of my Natural Science classes in Duncan Hall and I never had a problem with elevators or condensation. Duncan Hall is still standing, thank you, and at this time, the postcard image that I posted on Flickr is one of my most ‘favorited’ images.”

David has over 16,000 photos on Flickr. Enthusiasts far and wide have voiced their approval of Duncan Hall. 

“People all over the world think it’s a cool building, except the people who actually live here, which seems to be an ongoing challenge for San Jose,” David said. “We just don’t know what we’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

David’s tour is timely because right now the campus is proposing a mammoth destruction project, in which a good portion of the older buildings will be demolished with little understanding of what each academic department will subsequently need in order to operate thereafter, while tearing up the whole campus for years in the process. This is typical, of course.

Nevertheless, if David’s tour sells out, another one will surely emerge. More information can be found on the PAC*SJ website. No matter what happens, David will continue gathering materials.

“I spent close to $100 on old postcards of San Jose State,” David said. “Interesting to me that there were so many produced. Maybe because so many students went there.”

One of the postcards even arrived with someone’s original handwriting on the back, along with a canceled Franklin D. Roosevelt stamp. The sender of the postcard wrote: “Dear All — This is the school we visited this year. A little nicer than Berkeley…Leaving now for the ocean. See ya later in the week!”

A little nicer than Berkeley. It has a ring to it, you think?

Last week, locals filled up Rollati Ristorante, a swank Italian restaurant across the street from San Jose City Hall, to celebrate the eatery’s final night after a short two-year run.

Rollati was the result of an all-too-familiar sequence of events. In the early aughts, as City Hall construction began to take shape, the politicos wanted to gentrify the downmarket riffraff across the street, including the legendary dive Lenny’s Cocktails at 171 E. Santa Clara St., plus another dive, the Quality Café. There was also a popular car wash and a few vibrant Vietnamese-owned businesses. In textbook San Jose fashion, the city wiped out the whole block and replaced it with a parking lot that sat empty for years.

In the end, Lenny’s was the bottom of the barrel—in all the right ways—so at Rollati, surrounded by people from the polar-opposite end of the social and economic spectrums, I sat there and contemplated the memory of Lenny’s and the endless births, deaths and reincarnations of this particular block.

The history of Lenny’s Cocktails is quite colorful. Hard-working Italians were involved from day one. Namesake Leonard “Lenny” Macchiarella opened the bar in January of 1958 with his partner Tom Vicario, a recently retired navy chief. Macchiarella had previously owned other joints, including Kelly’s Club on Monterey Highway and the Del Rey on Almaden Road. 

A few years later, Macchiarella sold the bar to Thomas and Sebastian Basile and Anthony Brigiotta. However, the name Lenny’s never left 171 E. Santa Clara St., while Macchiarella went on to operate several other establishments including a few bowling alley lounges.

In the mid-’60s, the San Jose Parks and Recreation Department oversaw an adult basketball program with many local businesses participating. One year, Lenny’s Cocktails had a team in the same division with Santa Clara Lumber, Southgate Liquors and a men’s store at 2nd and Santa Clara called The Wardrobe, whose team was led by John Arrillaga.

Unfortunately, throughout the ’70s, downtown San Jose deteriorated into a skid-row-style crime zone. In 1984, the Merc wrote a real estate article, citing a property with the lowest rent at the time, $280 a month, which included “the roar of buses, 24-hour insecurity and a view of Circus Adult Books, Lenny’s Cocktail Lounge, Minit-Man Car Wash, Open Door Christian Bookstore and women in bouffant hairdos and leopard-skin miniskirts.”

For years, a greasy-spoon dive called the Quality Café sat right next to Lenny’s. Around 1991, I remember breakfast tipping the scales at $2.99. By 2000, it had skyrocketed to $5.50. The dude behind the grill looked like Captain Lou Albano from the World Wrestling Federation. Pickled drunks stumbled out of Lenny’s at 8am and hit up the breakfast. Hungover twenty-somethings would roll in after a long night at the rock clubs on South First Street, ahem.

Then the San Jose Redevelopment Agency changed everything.

With City Hall slotted to relocate back downtown, the politicians wanted to remove the unwashed masses, so Lenny’s Cocktails needed to go. Around 2000, the city devised an absurd cockamamie scheme, which included a new symphony hall at Fourth and Santa Clara. It never came close to happening, but they leveled the whole northern side of the block and then waited for the next idea, which later turned out to be the Miro Towers.

At the time, George Rich owned Lenny’s Cocktails. After the city bought him out, he took the money and then bought the Caravan from Tommy Thatcher. Rich then passed away in 2011, after which I wrote a column in this very space.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sad that Rollati couldn’t make it work. There absolutely should be a swank restaurant near City Hall where all the politicos can congregate and hold court at the bar with lawyers, judges and newspapermen. Every real city has, or had, a place like that. Something else will surely emerge. I’m certain of it.

Yet the unwashed masses need somewhere to go as well. The entire concept of the neighborhood bar has mostly disappeared.

These days, even upscale restaurants can’t guarantee success in downtown San Jose. Rollati itself has joined the long list of places that exist only in memory. We will have to wait to see what comes next.

Vacant lots and bulldozers don’t always get me down.

Forty years ago, El Paseo de Saratoga Shopping Center was a vibrant cosmopolitan epicenter of culture where monks and musicians gathered. It lives only in memory.

I am not suffering over this. If one becomes attached to a shopping mall, suffering will emerge because all shopping malls, especially in San Jose, are transitory. They all age. They all change. If the columnist fails to understand this, then he remains caught in a trap, grasping at impermanent phenomena.

Why am I telling you these things? Because right now, the Quito Road corner of El Paseo—today’s El Paseo—is gone. Flattened. Demolished. Don’t worry, it’s just one corner, so you can still hit up Noah’s Bagels and Panda Express.

On a recent visit, I couldn’t watch the bulldozers without memories of the original El Paseo center resurfacing, from back before the mall was destroyed the first time around.

Circa 1984, I bought my first European thrash metal LPs at Fantasy Records in El Paseo. The store was upstairs on the second level. That’s right—there were two levels.

At the time, El Paseo was a rustic open-air paradise with shady trees, fountains, courtyard spaces and walkways meandering over the water. I recall a radio station, a bookstore, a video game arcade, jewelry shops, a few music clubs, plus outré coffee concoctions at Perfect Blend. Even if I didn’t patronize every one of those places, I still remember them. Many of the retailers and restaurants emphasized healthy living or natural products, long before it became fashionable.

The dude who ran Red Planet Comics was an original thrash metal ambassador of the South Bay, introducing all of us kids to intriguing European albums that no one else carried—no one except for Fantasy Records.

If Satanic thrash metal wasn’t your thing, though, you could venture across the mall with your parents, head downstairs below the street level, and into a fantastic restaurant called Monk’s Retreat. It was also a wine cellar, with bottles from floor to ceiling. A giant statue of a monk, in robes, beckoned one in, as the customers descended into the restaurant for cheese fondue, chicken dishes and live classic guitar. From a kid’s perspective, it was so cool.

Another restaurant, Don Quixote, featured a conquistador theme and Catalonian dishes from Spain. My dad would pound glasses of sangria in that place, while sneaking me a few sips at age 14.

Right next door to Don Quixote was Booksellers—one of the greatest indie bookstores ever in San Jose. My mom would often take me there.

El Paseo had it all: backpacks, leather goods, pies, parrots, watches, water beds, violent thrash metal and even a business college. There was something for everyone.

Of course, nothing is permanent. As the years unfolded, demographics and shopping habits changed. By 1996, El Paseo had deteriorated into a half-empty ghost town. Many places closed and new ones did not want to open.

You can guess what happened next. In textbook San Jose fashion, the original rustic open-air complex was reduced to rubble and replaced with a soulless fabricated hellscape of chain retailers. A few indie restaurants came and went, but today, nothing interesting remains, which is why developers began salivating over new ways to smash the whole thing all over again. Sound familiar?

So, nearly 30 years after the original mall was demolished, the bulldozers have yet again leveled a piece of the current complex. Snazzy housing will soon rise on one corner, so that snazzy people can shop at Whole Foods. The remaining soulless fabricated hellscape of chain retailers will remain.

A wise guy from India articulated a term 2,600 years ago—the Pali word anicca—which meant impermanence. Everything arises due to causes and conditions, but everything is transitory.

To update this gem of truth, I will say this: Whatever gets built in San Jose will get destroyed 30 years later. Everyone who grows up in San Jose will eventually arrive at a point when everything recognizable from their childhood is now gone.

The old wise guy was right. The trick, as always, is to find contentment in the present moment. Next time I visit Panda Express, I will try to do just that.

Inspired by Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage and the poetry of Basho, I made a transcendental strip-mall journey to Senter Road.

To find the meaning of San Jose life, one must experience what others ignore. To see this way is to move closer to the secret heart of the world. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary is what quivers the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil of tourism.

Pulled along by the forces of suburban wasteland exploration, I recently reacquainted myself with the ancient-for-San Jose Caribbees Center. Located between the fairgrounds and Andrew Hill High School and adjacent to a few sprawling mobile home parks left over from the ’60s, Caribbees Center—with or without an apostrophe—unfolded as a long bustling strip of shops across a few different buildings, almost entirely Vietnamese. People wouldn’t normally visit unless they lived nearby, or unless they missed a bus stop and had to get off and go back.

In that sense, I felt grateful to be there. Much more interesting than the Grand Century Mall, Caribbees Center was a thriving, beautifully congested mess of commerce with a flavor of colorful chaos reminding me of many places I found throughout Southeast Asia. Don’t believe the negative Yelp reviews. It was quite fun to walk around such a place. The whole complex seemed more “vibrant” than anything in downtown San Jose.

As I took in angelic Vietnamese synthpop blasting out of the corner unit, I looked around and saw retailers selling mattresses, herbs, clocks, fabrics, massage chairs, pressure cookers, fans and various items. Colorful dresses and other clothing were displayed outside several stores. People and cars arrived and departed. Delivery workers rode up on motorized bicycles to grab fast food from a place I couldn’t pronounce. One shop allowed people to come in and refill their water jugs. There was also a laundromat and more hair salons than I wanted to count. Lee’s Supermarket was hopping. 

At other nodal points, old men crouched over makeshift sidewalk tables or in pockets of the parking lot, playing board games. It felt like a miniature Vietnamese equivalent of Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. Just down the walkway, a few rail-thin dudes in white T-shirts congregated in front of one place, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the lotto results.

As I walked around, another passage from The Art of Pilgrimage came to mind. The practice of soulful travel, Cousineau wrote, was to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life. This made sense to me, which is why I burrowed into the 1966 San Jose Shopping Center Guide for details.

The original Caribbees Center opened in 1961. By 1966, there was a Crown Supermarket, a 10,000-square-foot Giant Thrift store, a Del Monico’s Restaurant, a TV shop and various 800-square-foot spaces that rented for $150 a month, with “Trailer Courts, Inc” listed as the owner.

Then the United States took over the French colonial project in Vietnam and recklessly bombed the crap out of Southeast Asia for years, creating several hundred thousand refugees, many of whom eventually landed in San Jose and started vibrant businesses in ways the locals couldn’t. In the ’80s, another building was added to Caribbees Center and nowadays the whole place is a thriving Vietnamese complex.

As I continued prowling around, I noticed the current property manager’s office, replete with bars on the door. I poked my head in and saw a framed picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall, which was enough to drive me right back out the door.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed my rediscovery of Caribbees Center. One will not find this place in a tourism guide. Good. I’m not one of those “influencer” types, so I don’t “endorse” things anyway. I went back to Lee’s Supermarket because I needed some loose leaf tea and then went on my way.

In his travel diary Narrow Road to the Deep North, the poet-pilgrim Matsuo Basho wrote: “There came a day when the clouds drifting along with the wind aroused a wanderlust in me, and I set off on a journey to roam along the seashores.”

With no seashores anywhere in San Jose, I came to the realization years ago that strip-malls would just have to suffice.

And suffice they did.

To borrow a phrase from Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest was filled with bright moments.

First of all, the much-heralded Alebrijes—vivid sculptures from Oaxaca, Mexico—arrived in Plaza de Cesar Chavez earlier in the week, bringing a whole new life to the park. They were perfect.

On Wednesday night before the festival, Adolfo Gomez of Mezcal Restaurant, himself Oaxacan, threw a huge party, Noche de Alebrijes, in the San Jose Museum of Art, corralling chefs and tequila purveyors from all over town. It was masterfully done. By 8:30pm, people were already slow dancing.

By the time the festival started on Friday, everyone was anticipating the full moon, which appeared early Saturday, and along with the pulverizing daytime heat, triggered me to view the festival through a lens of bright moments. There were many. I can only survey a few.

On Friday, the biggest surprise came in the form of Summer Camargo, one of the newest members of the Saturday Night Live band, who appeared at the “California Music Lounge,” a killer intimate space upstairs in the California Theatre, where former Cafe Stritch employees toiled away as stagehands. It was Camargo’s first-ever gig anywhere in the state of California. A trumpet and flugelhorn maestro with wicked chops, she played a set that included many of her own compositions.

That same night, I also caught Bilal, whose transcendental essence filled the Montgomery Theatre. Unfortunately, I was upstairs in the balcony, where the sound was terrible. The kick drum and the bass guitar obliterated the rest of the mix. The theater simply wasn’t built for massive amplification.

These might be feuding words, but every gig that happened in Montgomery Theatre should have been at Hammer Theatre instead.

A brighter moment? Bilal’s midnight gig at the Break Room, which I did not see in person, but did watch later thanks to the Break Room’s live stream archive.

On Saturday, Camargo was back, this time on the main stage with the San Jose Jazz High School All-stars, always an inspiring, hopeful gig. Camargo even led them through a tune she originally wrote when she was in high school.

To me, this gig is always an important part of the festival. Music education prevented me from going down more nefarious paths in life, so it’s personal.

Speaking of music education, a few moments later, SJSU Music Department graduate Leela Paymai and her band Zheniia played a gorgeous fusion of Persian, jazz and psych-rock that we don’t often see around here. Some of the tunings were not of this hemisphere, as they say.

Just to explain how much we’ve evolved, 30 years ago in the SJSU Music Department, there was no such thing as a Persian student blending music from her own heritage with rock and jazz, and then writing her own tunes. Now someone like Paymai can land fellowships from San Jose Jazz and then wind up at the festival herself.

The only problem? The space, like Montgomery Theatre, is not designed for massive amplification if the gig gets to that point. It’s like putting a rock band in a dentist’s office.

That’s not a complaint. Many people, myself especially, are craving a more urban festival, but we just don’t have the venues.

It made me recall moments from previous festivals: Saxophone virtuoso James Carter outside Cafe Stritch telling us stories about gigging with Sun Ra. Latin jazz pioneer Jerry González at Cafe Stritch telling me Chet Baker stories from the ’70s. Everybody from everywhere showing up at Cafe Stritch all weekend long.

But back to the present.

Other highlights included the 10-woman Mariachi Las Catrinas covering “Dancing Queen,” Delbert Anderson going native, and Stella Cole mastering the Great American Songbook. Tyreek McDole was transcendental, the Headhunters still had it, and the San Jose Jazz U19s were another ray of hope for music education. Wow. All of ’em. Just … wow.

As the festival came to a close, the full moon was just starting to wane and the normal desolation of downtown San Jose on a Sunday night re-emerged all over again, but I did not feel empty. I was full, like the moon itself. Bright moments to all!

The San Jose Jazz Break Room looked quite a bit different in 1930. Today, the escalators are long gone.

This weekend, the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest explodes all over the urban landscape, celebrating 35 years of this particular festival and all its incarnations. As every year goes by, various clubs and spaces either move or simply go out of business. Then when Covid-19 hit, decimating live audiences, the folks at San Jose Jazz decided to convert a portion of their office into a venue for live streaming shows. Thus, the SJZ Break Room was born. 

The Break Room, as it’s often called, now showcases amazing gigs. During Summer Fest, the Break Room serves as one of the urban hangouts, a gathering place where late-nighters—you know, like most jazz people—can lurk in the shadows. It’s not a huge place, which gives it a close-up and intimate feel. Especially thanks to Ben Henderson’s sign-painting talents, people can now easily spot the place from outside, where it sits at First and San Carlos, across from Original Joe’s.

Inside, the lighting dims. What exists by day as an office then morphs into a club space accompanied by video projections from the live gig onto the bank of windows, unlike any other space in town. With a capacity of approximately 100, almost every seat is within 30 feet of the action. With the performers on the same level as the audience, each show feels like a living room gig.

Over the last few years, I’ve experienced mind-blowing performances at the Break Room. I’ve seen kids and I’ve seen veterans. I’ve seen musicians from all over the world in that space. This weekend, even more will unfold, including midnight shows Friday and Saturday nights.

In addition to the Local Color folks and Kaleid Gallery, both of which also occupy a space in the same building, the Break Room has successfully converted one of San Jose’s most hideous buildings into a destination. Many people, young and old, now pay attention to that corner.

Before the artists and musicians moved in, everyone did their best to ignore the building. Drunks and nightclubbers urinated all over it, or even slept beneath the overhang. 

I can remember, exactly 20 years ago, walking to the Metro offices every single day, right past the Valley Title Building when the Chamber of Commerce was located inside, on the street level. I would usually see someone passed out underneath the overhang. Right on the other side of the glass, inside, was the chamber CEO, sitting at her desk. Every day, that’s what I looked at, as I walked down South First: A downtrodden dude passed out on the pavement and the CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce on the other side of the glass. Talk about symbolism.

But it wasn’t always that bad.

In the glory days, when downtown San Jose still had retail, and when people dressed up in suits and drove Model Ts to go shopping, the same building was the legendary Hale Brothers Department Store. It opened in 1931.

Hale’s had it all. Clothing, toys, fashion, holiday stuff, a lunch room in the basement, and much more, straight up until 1968, when it died a natural death as the comfortable classes bailed for the suburbs. Thousands of old-timers still remember it. Many claim that Hale’s was the first place they ever saw an escalator.

Then, in a textbook San Jose maneuver, Valley Title took over the building, ripped out the escalators, ruined the exterior and converted the upper floors to ugly ’70s office hallways, which still remain to this day.

As usual, it took contemporary artists and avant-garde musicians to transform a hideous building, and a neighborhood, into something useful. One can only shudder at what would have happened otherwise.

After all, in 1931, City Hall was still located in what’s now Plaza de Cesar Chavez. There were no music festivals of any sort. The country bumpkins who populated San Jose certainly didn’t go to midnight jazz gigs. Recorded music barely even existed.

I like to think we’ve progressed since then. I know we have. This weekend, thanks to the SJZ Break Room, minds will again be blown.

You wouldn’t know by shuffling past 4Printings in Mountain View today, but 50 years ago this December, Paul Terrell opened the first Byte Shop in the same building.

One of the first personal computer stores in the history of the world, the Byte Shop sold several products, including fully assembled Altair microcomputers. Terrell was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, which also started in 1975. Other members included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

In a now famous story oft repeated by Cult of Mac fanatics, the very next year, 1976, Jobs walked into the Byte Shop and tried to sell Terrell the kit for his new machine, the Apple 1.

In those days, it was common for people to buy kits rather than complete computers, since there really weren’t very many complete computers. The kit would usually include a printed circuit board and the components. The user would solder the whole thing himself and then go find a power supply and a monitor.

Terrell didn’t want to sell any more kits. Instead, he wanted the whole thing assembled. In perhaps the most legendary instance of unintentional seed financing in Silicon Valley history, Terrell placed an order with Jobs for 50 Apple 1 units, if Jobs could just assemble them first and then bring them over to the Byte Shop.

The two Steves then did exactly that. As the legend goes, Terrell’s initial order of 50 assembled units, to be paid COD, helped convince the two Steves to quit working for other companies and get serious about their new adventure. Were it not for that initial order, Apple Computer, as a company, might not have happened.

This is not a new story. It’s been told over and over. But there should be a plaque in front of 1063 El Camino Real in Mountain View. It’s not the Hewlett-Packard Garage, but it deserves recognition. 

Especially with the Vintage Computer Festival set to erupt at the Computer History Museum this weekend (see story here), no professional wandering scholar would feel complete without prowling around the very building where this landmark deal went down nearly 50 years ago.

As with many stretches of El Camino, this area has always fascinated me, due to leftover pieces of old Mountain View juxtaposed with newer, more fancy establishments, a beautifully incongruous menagerie of structures. As I walked, I felt tapped into the essence of why people traveled on foot, from ancient times until now. I imagined the landscape of 1975, when Terrell first opened his legendary shop.

In those days, Mountain View was still old-school gritty suburbia, in all the right ways. Numerous dive bars along El Camino. Liquor stores with dark parking lots. Nefarious car washes. Stacks of stoner apartment complexes with beater Datsuns in front. Shoreline Boulevard was called Stierlin Road. There was nothing remotely urban. Orchards and farmland surrounded everything.

On the same stretch where 4Printings today operates, I could see examples of this. Right next door, I saw a barber shop that had been a barber shop for 70 years. Down the block, a decades-old tire shop harmonized a rug store and a newer Giorgio’s Italian Restaurant. Across the street, a similarly decades-old roadside motel was recently-as-of-20-years-ago painted in new shades of yellow, orange and ochre that looked ridiculous. I liked it better when it was a dump.

Similar juxtapositions remained. All I had to do was walk down the alley behind 4Printings and the barber shop. Both places had an entrance in the back. A Porsche and a Tesla were parked behind 4Printings. An old house sat next to the print shop, on the other side. Gorgeous foliage hung over a rusted wrought iron fence. Signage warned me that I was on camera. Nearby, a few side streets away, stacks of generic apartments that went for $700 in the ’80s were now four times as much.

Yet this old-school amble did not come without tremendous feelings of gratitude. The grand sweep of history was unavoidable.

I typed this column on a MacBook Pro. I’ve typed hundreds of these columns on MacBooks Pros.

The chain of karmic momentum that those guys started eventually brought me here. There is no end and no beginning. Jobs would certainly agree.

When a few thousand vintage computer freaks and their grandchildren congregate for a few days, enlightenment ensues. The past merges with the present and the future.

This weekend, the annual Vintage Computer Festival returns to the Computer History Museum. Over two days, historians will give tours and talks. People will sell a vast array of stuff on consignment. There will be panel sessions, parties and plenty of insider stories, with both nerds and newbies arriving en masse. Specific events will celebrate landmark anniversaries—from the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975 to the original Commodore Amiga launch in 1985.

These guys are not messing around. One previous festival featured more than ten different original Apple 1 machines, or pieces of machines, all on display.

“We had to hire a security guy,” said Dag Spicer, a Computer History Museum senior curator and member of the Vintage Computer Federation board. “That’s just under $10 million worth of computers in a little space.”

RR Auctions even showed up with a broken Apple 1 prototype hand-soldered by Steve Wozniak. It later ended up selling for nearly $700,000.

Another magical aspect of the Vintage Computer Festival is the sheer joy from watching all the kids. People don’t bring just sons and daughters. Plenty of third-generation folks are now showing up.

“One of my favorite things is the interaction between the parents and their kids,” said Erik Klein, president of the Vintage Computer Federation. To kids, Klein continued, computers are ubiquitous. They’ve got their phones, they’ve got their video games. “Their watches are probably more powerful than most IBM systems from the ’70s,” he said.

“It’s quite endearing in many ways,” Spicer added. “It’s wonderful to see these people, some of whom came from across the country, even around the world. So yeah, hands-on demos of historical systems from probably the ’60s to the ’90s, and you can learn preservation tips from other people who are preserving their own systems. They come to learn from the masters, so to speak.”

Yet perhaps the most mind-blowing machine currently on display at the Computer History Museum just might be the RAMAC 305, part of IBM’s groundbreaking 1956 computer system developed at 99 Notre Dame Ave. in downtown San Jose, IBM’s original West Coast R&D lab. The RAMAC was the prototype for all hard drives that we still use today. Without exaggeration, almost everything we do in terms of hard drive storage originated in that lab, in that building, which has sat empty and ignored for years because nobody in San Jose seems to care.

“In history, we talk about the importance of place. Or the magic of place,” Spicer said. It isn’t exactly the Grand Canyon or the Louvre, but 99 Notre Dame is important, even if for only a few. “You can take scientific tours of Paris that will take you through the buildings where Lavoisier and Pascal and Descartes and all these characters worked,” Spicer added. “And it’s a wonderful way to see Paris, but it’s really of interest only to science nerds. And that’s, in a way, I guess, what’s going on here.”

Everyone who ever saved anything to a hard drive has that building to thank, at least partly. It’s just overwhelming to contemplate.

“The amount of data that we generate on a daily basis, on this planet, and it’s all getting stuffed on hard drives from that core, from that seed, still today,” Klein said.

Over the years, informal talks have ensued, with San Jose City Hall and retired IBM employees that worked on the RAMAC, as well as the landlord, but no serious civic interest in the history has ever come to fruition.

Regardless, the Vintage Computer Fest will only get bigger and more expansive, with or without San Jose. Next year, in addition to the existing West Coast and East Coast festivals, there will be one in Canada and a few others.

“We’re talking to folks in Europe and South America and elsewhere,” Klein said. “We’re looking to get these shows going wherever people want to do it. We want the federation to be an umbrella organization for the hobbyist community, much like the museum is an umbrella organization for the history of these machines.”

The Vintage Computer Festival West takes place Aug 1, 10am-6pm, and Aug 2, 10am-5pm, at the Computer History Museum, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View. Tickets: connect.computerhistory.org.