The City of San Jose San Jose is the third-largest city in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States. It is the County Seat of Santa Clara County. San Jose is located in Silicon Valley at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Once a small farming city, San Jose became a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments between the 1960s and the 1990s, and is now the largest city in Northern California. As of the 2007 California Department of Finance estimate, San Jose had a population of 973,672. Originally known as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777 as the first town in the Spanish Colony of Nueva California, which later became Alta California. The city served as a farming community to support Spanish military installations at San Francisco and Monterey. When California gained statehood in 1850, San Jose served as its first capital. After more than 150 years as an agricultural center, increased demand for housing from soldiers and other veterans returning from World War ll, as well as aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s, led San Jose to become a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Growth in the 1970s attracted more businesses to the city. In the late 1980s, after four decades of heavy development and population growth, San Jose surpassed San Francisco in population to become the third most populous city in California. By the 1990s, San Jose's location within the booming local technology industry earned the city the nickname Capital of Silicon Valley.
San Jose or San
JoséOn April 3, 1979, the san
Jose City Council adopted San José as the spelling of the city name on
the city seal, official stationery, office titles and department names. Also, by city council convention, the
spelling of San José is used when the name is stated in both uppercase
and lowercase letters, but not when the name is stated only in uppercase
letters. The name is still more
commonly spelled without the diacritical mark as San Jose. The official name of the city remains The
City of San Jose with no diacritical mark, according to the City Charter.
History Prior
to western settlement, the area was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone
Native Americans. Though visited briefly by the English
two centuries prior, the first lasting European presence began with a series of
Franciscan missions in 1777 by Father Junipero Serra. San Jose was the first town in California,
founded as Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe on orders from Spanish viceroy of
Mexico on November 29, 1777 to establish a farming community in honor of Saint
Joseph. 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.
San Jose came under Mexican rule in 1825 after Mexico broke with the
Spanish crown. It then became part of the United States, after it capitulated
without bloodshed in 1846 and California was annexed. Soon afterwards, on March 27, 1850, San Jose became the
first incorporated city in the state, with Josiah Belden its first mayor.
The town was the state's first capital and host of the first and second
sessions (1850-1851) of the California Legislature.
Though not impacted as severely as San Francisco, San Jose suffered damage from
the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Over 100 people died at the Agnews Asylum (later Agnews State Hospital)
after its walls and roof collapsed, and
the San Jose High School's three-story stone was also destroyed. In 1933, in response to a murder, an
estimated 10,000 residents participated in the lynching of the two culprits. It would be the last public lynching in California's
history.
During World War ll many
Japanese were sent to internment camps and, following the summer of 1943 Los
Angeles zoot suit riots, anti-Mexican violence took place.
As World War ll started, the city's economy shifted from agriculture (the Del
Monte cannery was the largest employer) to industrial manufacturing with the
contracting of the Food Machinery Corporation (FMC) by the United States War
Department to build 1000 Landing Vehicle Tracked.
After World War ll, FMC
(later United Defense) continued as a defense contractor, with the San Jose
facilities designing and manufacturing military platforms such as the M113
Armored Personnel Carrier, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and various subsystems
of the Mi Abrams Tank. IBM established their west coast headquarters in San Jose in 1943 and
opened a downtown research and development facility in 1952. Both of which would prove to be harbingers for the
economy of San Jose, as Reynold Johnson and his team would later invent RAMAC,
as well as the disc drive, and the technology side of San Jose's economy grew.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the city annexed adjacent areas, such as Alviso
and Cambrian Park, providing large areas for suburbs. An anti-growth reaction to the effects of rapid development
emerged in the 1970s championed by mayors Norman Mineta and Janet Gray Hayes.
Despite establishing an
urban growth boundary, development fees, and incorporations of Campbell and
Cupertino, development was not slowed, but rather directed into already
incorporated areas.
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