Wes @ Play - Why to Love San Jose

Much has been said about the dreary nature of San Jose, but I think it's clearly a case of low self-esteem on a metropolitan scale.

Whenever I visit San Francisco, I often hear people responding to what I'm wearing or doing or saying with "only in San Francisco." I quickly correct them. "I'm from San Jose," I say. "San Francisco bores me."

San Francisco is on a pretty peninsula, it has tepid summers, and the fog is pretty, but it's just a chunk of land with some buildings on it. San Jose is less geographically interesting, but also less homogenous, the Malaysia of the West. I tell my friends that I can't wait until the Mexican-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, Korean-Americans, etc etc. start to intermarry. And open restaurants. THAT, my friends, will be paradise.

There are three things that San Jose could do to remedy its residents' embarassment about living in the South Bay:

1. Rebuild the Electric Tower

2. Install light sculptures like the Semaphore piece at the top of the Adobe building, throughout downtown

3. Only allow skyscrapers with some architectural merit to be built, locate them only next to light rail stations, and spread them across the valley (the Vancouver model)