Brush With Greatness

Posted by Gary Singh on Thursday, January 01, 2009

Shepard Fairey “marketing” at the corner of Southwest Expressway and Fruitdale, San Jose, August 2000.

Most cities revel in their own pop culture landmarks or specific locales tied to things that celebrities did there. For example, much hoopla survives about the road outside Paso Robles where James Dean crashed and died, the garage that spawned Hewlett-Packard, or that stretch of highway in Malibu where Mel Gibson got his infamous DUI.  San Jose has a few similar sites, for example, the house on Jackson Street where Nirvana stayed in 1990.

I will suggest another local landmark which might possibly achieve similar notoriety: the city utilities box at the corner of Fruitdale and Southwest Expressway, where Shepard Fairey, on Aug. 2, 2000, plastered a promotional poster for his art show at Anno Domini the next night. 

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Market Fresh

Posted by Gary Singh on Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Public Market at Vancouver’s Granville Island is thriving center of community and commerce.

Tom McEnery has plans to revamp the entire San Pedro Square historic district in downtown San Jose and build a permanent outdoor public market neighborhood, anchored by the Peralta Adobe and the Fallon House, and inspired by world-renowned locales like the Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, for decades San Jose has excelled at allocating public money for failed downtown projects, so some of the citizenry out there in the suburbs is hyperpessimistic about such an ambitious project, especially one that yet again asks for a taxpayer “loan.” But the San Jose Public Market is a great idea, if you flesh it out. I’ll leave the political, legal and financial brouhahas for more specialized commentators and instead offer my own conjecture.

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Room Of Secrets

Posted by Gary Singh on Thursday, December 11, 2008

St. James Park from above, displaying its possible Masonic significance

You never know what you’ll find in the California Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library. Every time I invade the place, I wind up staying at least an extra 30 minutes, because the room is so utterly jammed to the gills with crackpot historical miscellanea. I always wind up rummaging around for something I wasn’t even planning on looking for in the first place. If you aren’t familiar with the cargo of books, pamphlets, maps, old newspaper clippings and photographs within its walls, you should be.

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Rebel Revisited

Posted by Gary Singh on Thursday, December 04, 2008

Tiburcio Vasquez: A forgotten local bandito

Since there just aren’t enough documentaries about 19th-century Mexican banditos who were hung in San Jose, resident author and publisher Charlie Trujillo decided to begin making one. The scalawag under discussion is every local historian’s favorite forgotten troublemaker, Tiburcio Vasquez, who rampaged across California during the post–Gold Rush era.

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Clampers on Parade

Posted by Gary Singh on Thursday, November 20, 2008

LAST week’s Veterans Day parade provided an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus, Mountain Charlie Chapter No. 1850. The Clampers, as they call themselves, are a men’s drinking fraternity of the absurd that doubles as a historical preservation society. They sport Old West duds and install historical plaques at various locales throughout California, swilling drinks in the process. The Mountain Charley chapter, our local faction, is named after “Mountain Charlie” McKiernan, the legendary Santa Cruz Mountain trailblazer and grizzly fighter. 

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