45 Fun Facts About San Jose

San Jose is the county seat of which California county?

Santa Clara County has San Jose as its seat and largest city, yet it is named for Mission Santa Clara de Asís, founded nearby earlier in the same year as the pueblo.

Which city was founded in 1781 as Spanish California's second civilian town, four years after San Jose?

Los Angeles began in 1781 as the second pueblo, a farm town like San Jose, which José Joaquín Moraga had founded four years earlier with 14 settler families.

San Jose's pueblo was founded to grow food for which two Spanish presidios?

San Francisco and Monterey were the presidios it fed: the first colonists, who had come overland from Mexico with the Anza expedition, were settled between the two forts as farmers.

What distinction did San Jose hold when California joined the Union in 1850?

It was the first capital: the legislature met in San Jose from December 1849 until 1851, on what is now Plaza de César Chávez, before lawmakers decamped to Vallejo.

California's first two legislative sessions, held in 1850 and 1851, earned what boozy nickname?

The 'Legislature of a Thousand Drinks' so disliked its makeshift quarters that after two sessions it took up Mariano Vallejo's offer of land for a new seat of government.

Which computer pioneer, born in San Jose in 1950, has a downtown street named for his nickname?

Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder known as Woz, was the biggest private donor to the campaign that built the Children's Discovery Museum, whose address is 180 Woz Way.

Which mayor adopted the motto "Capital of Silicon Valley" in 1988?

Tom McEnery, mayor from 1983 to 1991, adopted 'Capital of Silicon Valley' as the tech boom transformed the old farm town; a Chronicle columnist later likened it to Arlington, Virginia, claiming to be America's capital.

As of the 2020 census, which city ranks second in California by population, one place above San Jose?

San Diego, with about 1.39 million residents in 2020, sits one place above San Jose, which took third from San Francisco in the 1990 census after growing eightfold since 1950.

Before San Jose, which was the only US city to fall back below one million residents?

Detroit peaked near 1.85 million in 1950 and fell below one million by the 2000 census as auto jobs and residents left for the suburbs; San Jose followed with a 2022 estimate of 971,233.

Before the tech boom, the orchard-filled region around San Jose went by what nickname?

The 'Valley of Heart's Delight' was America's leading fruit-growing and canning region until the 1960s, famed for prunes and apricots, before suburbs and tech campuses replaced the orchards.

Which vegetable was first farmed commercially in the United States near San Jose in the 1920s?

Broccoli: Sicilian-born brothers Stefano and Andrea D'Arrigo raised it near San Jose from seed sent from Sicily, then shipped it to the East Coast under their Andy Boy label, trademarked in 1927.

San Jose's Almaden Valley is named for mines producing which metal, vital to gold-rush ore processing?

Mercury came from New Almaden, named after Spain's Almadén mine and once North America's largest producer; San Jose's Mercury newspaper was named with a nod to both the metal and the messenger god.

Which company was San Jose's largest employer for years before its cannery closed in 1999?

Del Monte had the best-known brand and the longest life among San Jose's canneries; when its plant shut in 1999, it ended an industry in which generations of local students had worked their summers.

Which company opened San Jose operations in 1943 and later invented the hard disk drive there?

IBM began in San Jose with a 1943 punch-card plant; at its 1952 lab Reynold Johnson's team built RAMAC, a machine weighing over a ton whose fifty 24-inch disks held about five megabytes.

What was Charles Herrold's 1909 station, regarded as the first with scheduled radio programming, called?

Herrold's station announced itself as 'San Jose Calling'; his wife Sybil played records on air from 1912, and the station evolved into KQW and finally KCBS in San Francisco.

Which of these tech companies is headquartered in San Jose?

Adobe was founded in Mountain View in 1982 and later moved its headquarters to towers in downtown San Jose; Apple is based in Cupertino, Google in Mountain View and Meta in Menlo Park.

Sarah Winchester, who built San Jose's sprawling Mystery House, was the widow of which kind of magnate?

A firearms maker: William Wirt Winchester was heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and after his death in 1881 Sarah moved to California and bought the farmhouse she spent decades enlarging.

Roughly how many rooms did Sarah Winchester's ever-growing San Jose mansion have when she died in 1922?

160 rooms is the usual count, along with some 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows and 47 stairways, all grown from the eight-room farmhouse she bought in 1886.

What destroyed the seven-story tower of the Winchester house?

The 1906 earthquake brought down the seven-story tower and wrecked the upper floors; Sarah Winchester had the rubble cleared but never rebuilt, which is why some doors now open onto nothing.

Lick Observatory, east of San Jose, sits on top of which mountain?

Lick Observatory, completed in 1888 on the 4,200-foot summit of Mount Hamilton, was the world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory; San Jose adopted sodium street lamps to limit its light pollution.

Where is James Lick, the benefactor of Lick Observatory, buried?

Under the telescope: Lick died in 1876, and in 1887 his body was laid beneath the future site of the great refractor, where a tablet reads 'Here lies the body of James Lick'.

Which moon of Jupiter, the first found since Galileo's time, was discovered at Lick Observatory in 1892?

Amalthea was spotted by eye by Edward Emerson Barnard at Lick's great refractor, the last moon ever found without photography; Charles Perrine's later Jovian finds there came from photographic plates.

What kind of institution was San Jose State University when it was founded in 1857?

San Jose State began as Minns' Evening Normal School, a normal school for teachers, in San Francisco in 1857; it moved to San Jose in 1871 and became the founding campus of the California State University system.

What nickname did San Jose State's track team earn while producing Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Lee Evans?

'Speed City' was the 1960s nickname of coach Bud Winter's sprint programme; Smith and Carlos gave their raised-fist salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and a statue of them stands on campus.

Which two San Jose State alumni won a combined four Super Bowls as NFL head coaches?

Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil both played at San Jose State; Walsh won three Super Bowls with the 49ers, and Vermeil won one with the Rams after quitting coaching for 14 years, citing burnout.

What is the mascot name of San Jose State's sports teams?

Spartans was also the football stadium's name for more than eight decades: Spartan Stadium, opened in 1933, kept it until a credit union bought the naming rights in 2016.

Where did the San Jose Sharks play home games for their first two NHL seasons, before their own arena opened?

The Cow Palace in Daly City, a former livestock pavilion, hosted the Sharks from 1991 to 1993, even though the NHL had rejected the building in 1967 as a home for the Seals.

Which name finished ahead of 'Sharks' in the contest to name San Jose's NHL team?

Blades topped the mail-in contest, which drew more than 5,000 suggestions, but the owners, the Gund brothers, feared the name evoked weapons and chose the runner-up.

Which software company bought the naming rights to the Sharks' arena, the Shark Tank, in 2013?

SAP was co-founded by Hasso Plattner, who also heads the Sharks' ownership group; its 2013 deal gave the arena a fourth name, after San Jose Arena, Compaq Center and HP Pavilion.

Which team beat the Sharks in their first Stanley Cup Final appearance, in 2016?

The Pittsburgh Penguins won the 2016 final in six games; San Jose had won the Presidents' Trophy in 2008-09 without reaching a final.

Which former Norris Trophy winner was named the Sharks' first captain in 1991?

Doug Wilson, the 1982 Norris Trophy winner with Chicago, captained the expansion Sharks and later ran the team as general manager from 2003 to 2022.

What was the San Jose Earthquakes' name when they began MLS play in 1996?

The San Jose Clash, a name pushed by league investor Nike, played from 1996 until the club readopted the Earthquakes name of the old NASL side for the 2000 season.

Who scored the first goal in MLS history, for San Jose against D.C. United in 1996?

Eric Wynalda's late goal won the league's inaugural match 1-0 before 31,683 fans in San Jose on April 6, 1996, sparing MLS a scoreless debut.

Which US star, on loan from Bayer Leverkusen, led the Earthquakes to MLS Cup titles in 2001 and 2003?

Landon Donovan, unhappy at Leverkusen, came to San Jose on loan and scored twice in the 4-2 win over Chicago in the 2003 final, where he was named most valuable player.

Which mixed-use shopping and dining district opened in San Jose in 2002?

Santana Row opened in 2002 on the site of the old Town & Country Village, only months after its largest building burned in the biggest structure fire in San Jose's history.

San Jose's airport is named after which local politician who served as US Secretary of Transportation?

Norman Mineta was held as a boy in a wartime camp for Japanese Americans, became San Jose's mayor in 1971 and later sat in the cabinets of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Which airline carried more than half of all passengers at San Jose's airport in 2021?

Southwest flew 54 percent of San Jose's passengers in 2021, with Alaska next on about 19 percent; though San Jose is the Bay Area's largest city, its airport is only the region's second busiest, after SFO.

Who sang the 1968 hit "Do You Know the Way to San Jose"?

Dionne Warwick had to be talked into recording the Bacharach and David song, which she called dumb, yet it sold millions and won her a first Grammy.

Which board game has a Guinness-record permanent version beside San Jose's Children's Discovery Museum?

Monopoly in the Park is a 930-square-foot granite board recognised by Guinness; it was built for a 1992 garden and landscape show and found its permanent home in San Jose in 2002.

San Jose's Ira F. Brilliant Center holds the largest collection outside Europe devoted to which composer?

Beethoven is the centre's sole subject; it opened in 1985 after Arizona property developer Ira Brilliant gave San Jose State his collection of 75 first editions of the composer's music.

Which landmark did San Jose accuse of copying its 1881 Electric Light Tower in a 1989 mock trial?

The Eiffel Tower rose eight years after San Jose's 237-foot iron light tower; the mock trial's judge ruled that Paris had come up with the idea independently, and the original fell in a 1915 storm.

Which waterway runs north through San Jose from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the bay at Alviso?

The Guadalupe River rises in the Santa Cruz Mountains, flows north past downtown San Jose and the arena, and reaches San Francisco Bay at Alviso; steelhead and Chinook salmon spawn in it.

Which American architect, famed for gleaming white modernist buildings, designed San Jose's City Hall, opened in 2005?

Richard Meier, architect of the Getty Center, designed the 18-storey tower and glass rotunda; downtown heights are capped because the district lies under the airport's flight path.

San Jose is the largest US city not served by which kind of highway?

San Jose lacks a primary Interstate and is served only by the three-digit spurs 280, 680 and 880, because the system was laid out in the 1950s before the city's boom.

What nickname did the annexation-hungry staff of 1950s city manager A. P. 'Dutch' Hamann earn?

'Dutch's Panzer Division' pushed through well over a thousand annexations between 1950 and 1969, as San Jose grew from 95,000 residents to nearly half a million.