Historic downtown San Jose building to be razed for Jay Paul’s mega campus

Three downtown San Jose office towers that will replace a former courthouse building believed to be the city's best example of Brutalist architecture.

A debate over the historical importance of a downtown San Jose building was put to rest this week when city lawmakers approved its demolition as part of a plan to build a massive office campus that is expected to profoundly transform the city’s skyline and downtown core.

“We’ve got a lot of ambitions for downtown, particularly for corners like this one, and this architecture is utterly inconsistent with all of our notions of urban design,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said before the council unanimously approved the building’s demolition at a Tuesday night city council meeting. “It also doesn’t take advantage of the very scarce space we have in our very tight, constrained downtown.”

The CityView Plaza development — which the city council subsequently approved in a unanimous vote on Tuesday — will consist of a trio of 19-story glass towers connected by bridges and featuring a total of 3.6 million square feet of office space and 24,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The 8.1-acre project site is bounded by South Almaden Boulevard, West San Fernando Street, South Market Street, and Park Avenue.

As part of its plans, San Fransisco-based developer Jay Paul will demolish all nine structures currently on the site, including a 50-year-old former Bank of California and county courthouse building known for its rigid geometric shapes.

“While City View’s past as a corporate banking center was critical to San Jose’s redevelopment in the 50s and 60s, City View’s future as a modern, sustainable, pedestrian-friendly urban environment designed for today’s industries is vitally critical to the city’s future,” Janette D’Ellia of Jay Paul Co. told the council Tuesday night.

San Jose preservationists earlier this year began a quest to convince city officials to designate the building as a historic city landmark in an effort to save it from destruction. And just last month, the vocal residents won over the support of the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission, which unanimously recommended that the council provide it with the historic recognition.

“This is not a last-minute intervention by out-of-touch preservationists, it has taken us 20 years to get to this point,” Mike Sodergren of the Preservation Action Council of San Jose said during Tuesday’s meeting. “We need to make sure that we preserve and celebrate what makes us unique and to make sure that we formally recognize our landmarks — even if their long-term fate is not known.”

Completed in 1973 as part of the city’s first urban redevelopment project, the city’s Historic Preservation Officer Juliet Arroyo called the building San Jose’s “best example” of Brutalist architecture — a style that is known for its blocky, rigid geometric shapes created from poured concrete.

According to the city, the building’s architect was internationally renowned César Pelli, who designed a wide range of well-known structures from San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower to the Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington D.C. to the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia — the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004.

Ben Leech, executive director of the Preservation Action Council, said that he wasn’t opposed to Jay Paul’s plans but that he believed the project could still be built while also saving the former courthouse building — located on just .5 acres of the 8.1-acre site.

“This is not a vote against City View plaza. Its a vote of encouragement to improve the project for the future,” Leech said during the council meeting. “This does not have to be an either-or decision.”

But whether the building could truly be deemed as historic was a big point of debate during the meeting this week with doubt raised by local real estate developers, residents and San Jose business leaders.

Matthew Mahood, CEO of the Silicon Valley Organization, called the historic building “commercially unviable as an operable building” and its historic designation “completely unnecessary.”

“If it was really indeed a historical site, it would have been designated so long, long ago,” Mahood said.

The CityView Plaza site is across the street from Adobe’s headquarters and just a few blocks away from the Diridon train station and Google’s anticipated transit-oriented community.

The campus is expected to create more than 2,600 full-time construction jobs a year during development over the next half-decade and more than 16,000 jobs at the campus once it’s complete. Jay Paul estimates the project will garner nearly $9.1 million in tax revenue for the city per year and $16 million for the San Jose Unified School District, according to the developer.

“This is the kind of development that we’ve been hoping to attract into our city and hopefully this will spur more development interests and we can continue to grow up from the center of our city,” Councilmember Raul Peralez said.