Goddard School Stakes Two San Jose Corners for More Than 300 Childcare Slots

The Goddard School is lining up two San Jose campuses that would add at least 46 jobs and more than 300 licensed childcare seats, one on The Alameda near Diridon and one on Cottle Road in South San Jose. Both projects recycle empty retail boxes rather than punching new holes in residential blocks.

The 821 Alameda site will carry the name The Goddard School of Diridon. Plans call for converting a 12,690-square-foot former CVS into 12 classrooms for as many as 180 children, ages six weeks through 5, plus about 25 staff jobs. Two outdoor playgrounds and an activity lab would cover roughly 12,943 square feet of the old parking field. A Goddard representative told the Silicon Valley Business Journal the school is still in development and pointed to a 2027 opening. The stretch already holds Whole Foods, Chipotle, Anytime Fitness, and apartments at Avalon Cahill Park and 787 The Alameda, a short walk from Caltrain’s Diridon Station and SAP Center. For families who work Downtown San Jose or ride the train, the location is the point.

South San Jose would take a slice of the long-vacant Orchard Supply Hardware building at 5651 Cottle Road. City permits describe a 9,800-square-foot conversion with classrooms and playgrounds for 144 children and 21 employees. Dollinger Properties bought the 4.3-acre lot at auction in 2025. The larger project would also install a Sprouts Farmers Market of about 25,100 square feet and two unleased retail bays. A planning hearing was on the City Council calendar in mid-September. Hours listed in earlier filings ran Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Neighbors include Orchard Town and Country shops such as Baskin-Robbins and Castillo’s.

Goddard already runs Bay Area schools in San Francisco, San Ramon, and Brentwood. Combined, the two San Jose rooms would put 324 infants through preschoolers into licensed care and give the franchise its first foothold in the city proper. Childcare capacity is not a luxury item here. Putting it next to a grocery store and next to a transit station is the kind of reuse that makes empty big boxes useful again. Enrollment and job postings will follow construction. Goddard’s locator page is at www.goddardschool.com.

Source: SVBJ

Diwali Carnival Returns to the Plaza on October 24

The Association of Indo Americans will bring San Jose Diwali Carnival back to Plaza de César Chávez on Saturday, October 24. City permit hours run 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eventbrite lists the window as 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., with a 2 p.m. start in the description. The plaza sits at 1 Paseo de San Antonio in Downtown San Jose. AIA’s vendor calendar puts expected turnout above 7,500. Last October’s first downtown carnival drew a much larger crowd than the permit number suggested. Entry is listed as free.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, lands in late October this year. The carnival format that worked in 2025 returns this year: food courts, jewelry and fashion booths, kids’ activities, henna, ritual space, and a stage. AIA’s food list from the last plaza night included chai, jalebi, chaat, dosa, and biryani. A separate AIA show, Dussehra Diwali Dhamaka, is set for October 17 at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

California recognized Diwali as a state holiday through Assemblymember Ash Kalra’s bill. The plaza already hosts Music in the Park, Christmas in the Park buildup, and half the city’s civic photo ops. Putting lamps and a sound system there for one Saturday is how a tech city shows it can hold a religious festival without moving it to the suburbs. RSVP and updates live on AIA’s site below.

Register at https://www.aiaevents.org/san-jose-diwali-carnival

Minth Pays $8.35 Million for a North San Jose Shop Floor

Minth California Inc. closed on 2040 Ringwood Avenue for $8.35 million, according to a deed recorded September 17. The seller was Ringwood Properties LLC. The one-story building is 23,800 square feet on 2.54 acres, built in 1986, and listed by JLL as R&D and manufacturing space with 800 amps at 277/480 volts, one dock-high door, one grade-level door, and solar installed in 2015. Ardent Systems, which does electronics manufacturing and storage-device test work, had used the site.

Minth Group, based in Taiwan, makes exterior trim, body structure parts, and battery enclosures for more than 70 automakers. Lucid is among its customers. The company already runs dozens of plants across three continents. A modest North San Jose box will not match a Windsor-scale factory, but it puts a parts supplier inside the same industrial belt as Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid’s regional footprints. General Motors recently bulked up at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. Auto work in Silicon Valley has been drifting from showrooms toward engineering and component space.

North San Jose holds more than 20 million square feet of industrial inventory, the largest pile in the valley, with a 7.6 percent vacancy rate and some of the region’s lower industrial rents, per Cushman & Wakefield. Class A product is tight, so buyers have been taking second-generation buildings that still have power and dock access. Ringwood sits near the Milpitas line in the 95131 zip. Minth did not comment on how it will use the floor.

Source: SVBJ

Sharks Finish Second in the NHL’s Offseason TikTok Race

Hard Rock Bet Canada scored every official NHL TikTok account from June 16 to September 14 and put the San Jose Sharks second in the league. Boston won the composite index at 78.0 after stacking 14 million views. San Jose landed at 65.6. The surprise was not the ranking so much as how the Teal got there.

The Sharks collected 4.3 million total views, fourth in the NHL behind Boston, Toronto, and Florida. What separated them was what happened after the play button. Their engagement rate hit 20.4 percent, the highest of any club in the study. Median views per video sat at 53,300. Chicago, Minnesota, and Carolina also posted strong interaction numbers. Montreal led the league in median views per post at 58,000. San Jose’s mix of reach and reply rate is what pushed a mid-pack view total into a top-two index score.

The index weighted five pieces: overall reach, content performance, fan engagement, shareability, and consistency, so a single lucky clip would not carry a team. Boston’s volume still won. San Jose’s comments, likes, and shares per viewer did more work per video. That tracks with a fanbase that spent the summer watching Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith, and the rest of a young core show up in short-form clips while Mike Grier added veterans and Ryan Warsofsky signed an extension.

The team’s own feed is @sanjosesharks. Tickets and the 2026-27 schedule are at https://www.nhl.com/sharks.

Little Italy Turns Ten on Sharks Way

Little Italy San Jose will mark ten years of its street festival on Sunday, October 4, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Little Italy Way and Sharks Way, a few blocks from SAP Center in Downtown San Jose. Organizers at the Little Italy San Jose Foundation expect 20,000 to 25,000 people. The district itself dates to 2016--the festival grew into one of Northern California’s larger Italian days, with food stalls, Cal-Italia wine, crafts, museum tours, a kids’ train, and a car row that now ranks among the bigger Italian-marque displays in the country. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Pagani usually show up.

Opening ceremonies start at 11:30 a.m. Grammy-winning accordionist Cory Pesaturo takes 12:15. New York Italian-American jazz singer Vanessa Racci follows at 1:15, then a duo set with Pesaturo at 1:45. Tenor Pasquale Esposito headlines at 3:15 for about 90 minutes. The Anthony Nino Lane Band closes from 5:30. New murals honoring Italian-American work in the valley are scheduled for dedication over the weekend. Proceeds feed the Cultural Center and Museum on the same block.

Today is the paid warm-up: a four-course dinner with wine and a concert by Racci and Pesaturo at the Museum Piazza and Italian Cellar Speakeasy, $75 a head. That is the only ticketed piece.

Festival page and dinner tickets: https://www.littleitalysj.com/little-italy-san-jose-festival

Aven Lands on Sharks Home Helmets Through 2028-29

The word Aven will sit on San Jose Sharks home helmets starting today against the Florida Panthers, the first night of a deal that runs through the 2028-29 season. The San Francisco fintech, which sells a credit card backed by home equity, also picked up branding at SAP Center, Sharks Ice at San Jose, team broadcasts and digital channels, and Sharks Foundation programs.

Sharks Sports & Entertainment president Jonathan Becher framed the pact to the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a working partnership rather than a logo rental. Aven spokesperson Rick Chen said the club’s audience lines up with the company’s target: Bay Area homeowners who might use a lower-rate card instead of a conventional one.

The timing is not accidental. After the second half of last season, Becher said broadcasts, social traffic, season-ticket memberships, and merch all moved up. Inbound partnership inquiries tripled versus a year earlier. Team deals now range from about $100,000 to more than $10 million a year. On the ice the club is selling a young core: Macklin Celebrini (NHL 27 cover athlete), Will Smith, Ivar Stenberg, and Michael Misa.

Source: SVBJ

A $500,000 Green Room Puts Levitt Closer to St. James Park

Aart de Geus, the former Synopsys CEO who still plays guitar in a blues band, put $500,000 toward a permanent Levitt Pavilion stage in St. James Park. The gift carries naming rights. He assigned them to the green room and put Chris Wilder’s name on the door. Wilder, former executive director of the Valley Health Foundation and a onetime San Jose Jazz board chair, survived a massive stroke in 2021. The two met when Wilder invited de Geus to a CEO jam at Jazz Summer Fest and later formed Legally Blue, Wilder on bass, de Geus on guitar.

Friends of Levitt Pavilion San Jose have staged free summer shows in the park for years while chasing a fixed venue. Construction is slated to start next summer, with Levitt Foundation money layered on top of local gifts. The finished pavilion is supposed to host 40 to 50 free concerts a year plus rentals for schools, nonprofits, and civic groups. The group’s own math puts $14.3 million a year into the Downtown San Jose economy and 50 regional acts on the payroll. Suzanne St. John Crane, the organization’s director of strategy, called de Geus a useful example of a tech principal writing a check instead of waiting for someone else.

De Geus has said Silicon Valley still under-funds the arts relative to the money and the number of engineers who moonlight as musicians. The last pop-up of the 2026 season packed the lawn for Peach Tree Rascals on September 6. The next step is steel in the park, not another season of rented risers.

Give and follow the build at https://www.levittsanjose.org.

Source: SiliconValley.com

SAP Center Puts the Letters Back Up as Phase One Wraps

The SAP Center letters are back on the south entrance, hung a little higher to clear a new digital display and the footprint of an expanded Sharks team store. That store is the headline of Phase One of the Teal Reimagination, a multi-year overhaul budgeted at about $425 million. Phase One itself cost just under $30 million and is scheduled to finish this fall.

Opening night is October 1 against the Florida Panthers. Fans walking in that week will find a new bar with eight points of sale at the top of the south-side escalators, a guest-experience kiosk shifted nearby, and Section 216 turned into a walk-through grab-and-go market with self-checkout. The team store above the south doors is slated for mid-November and will run about three times the size of the current shop. Jon Gustafson, the Sharks’ senior vice president, told the Silicon Valley Business Journal the retail upgrade is the biggest visible change of this first slice.

Phase Two starts in January 2027 with locker rooms and a premium lounge. After the 2026-27 season ends, the building is set to go dark for concerts through summer 2027 so the heavy structural work can happen without a mid-week show in the way. That phase is meant to be ready for the 2027-28 opener. Later chapters call for a reseated lower bowl that could add about 100 seats, more food-and-beverage points, restrooms, premium rooms, and new entries. About 90 percent of Sharks staff will move later this year to 450 W. Santa Clara Street so current arena offices can become home and visitor locker space.

Five or six phases remain on the table depending on costs. Perkins&Will designed the work. Renderings and updates live at https://www.tealreimagination.com. Tickets for October 1 are available at https://www.nhl.com/sharks.

Source: SVBJ

SummerHill Locks In 6.3 Acres for 616 North San Jose Apartments

Del Rey Investment Co. signed a contract to sell SummerHill Apartment Communities two empty parcels at Baypointe Parkway and Zanker Road: 3.7 acres at 240 Baypointe and 2.6 acres at 255 Baypointe. Closing deadlines in the county files run to late July 2028 for the larger lot and late July 2029 for the smaller one. The price stayed off the record.

If the city signs off, SummerHill would put 315 apartments in a six-story building at 240 and 301 apartments in an eight-story building across the street at 255, for 616 units on 6.3 acres. Filings list a club room, lounge, fitness center, and two-level roof decks on the six-story side; the eight-story side would add a bike room, pool deck, and roof deck. Both sit over podium parking. The sites had been flagged earlier on Affordable Housing Overlay maps. No construction calendar is attached yet. Final entitlements still have to clear San Jose planners.

The same developer is already at work a block away at 210 Baypointe, where 42 townhomes and a 292-unit rental building are replacing a one-story office. Baypointe VTA light rail is the commute argument. North San Jose has been the city’s designated tech-job cluster for years; putting mid-rise housing on leftover pads next to that cluster is the general-plan logic in plain language. Del Rey’s principals, John Arrillaga Jr. and Jason Peery, sit in the family line of Peery Arrillaga, the firm that assembled much of the valley’s suburban office stock.

Source: The Mercury News

Dollar Tree Joins the Next Wave at The Plant

Dollar Tree is combining three storefronts at The Plant, the 650,000-square-foot power center at Monterey Road and Curtner Avenue, into a new shop at 2151 Monterey. Suites 40, 60, and 80 add up to about 9,772 square feet on the leasing flyer. Suite 40 used to be Payless. No opening date has been posted. A Customer Service Associate listing already uses that Monterey Highway address, which is usually a sign the build-out is underway. Dollar Tree opened more than 100 stores in the first quarter of 2026 and still plans about 400 new locations this year even while closing 75 others.

The Plant has been filling holes since Arc Capital Partners and Milan Capital Management bought the center for $95 million in August 2024. Vacancy had been high under the previous owner. Target and Home Depot still sit as shadow anchors; Realty Income paid $73 million for the Home Depot pad in late 2024 without changing the store. Best Buy, Ross, Ulta, PetSmart, and a string of restaurants never left.

Vallarta Supermarkets is slated to take the old Toys R Us box, close to 60,000 square feet, with a November target. That would be Vallarta’s first Bay Area store and would put a full cocina next to the big-box row. Chikin Drip, the San Jose hot-chicken outfit, already opened a second kitchen at 81 Curtner inside the same property. Sixteen dining spots and ten national anchors are the pitch the landlords have been using.

The full directory and hours are available at https://www.plantsanjose.com.

Source: SVBJ

Council Takes Up a Five-Year Parking Hike on Tuesday

City Council will hear a revised downtown parking plan on Tuesday, September 29. Downtown Parking Board Vice Chair Tamiko Rast sent an open letter last week asking the council to pause. The Department of Transportation’s five-year ladder would raise garage hourly rates by $1 in year one and special-event garage rates by $3. Year two would add $1 an hour to about 1,600 core meters now at $2. Year three would keep those meters running until 9 p.m. instead of 6 p.m. Year four would add another $2 to event rates. Year five would lift every city meter by $1. The first 90 minutes in city garages, including the Convention Center Garage, would stay free. Sundays would stay free.

The Parking Fund takes in about $15 million a year. The current budget already pulled $1.2 million from that fund into the general fund to help cover a deficit north of $26 million. Staff project the full rate package, once it lands in 2030, would add about $4 million a year. Last fiscal year the fund also sent $972,000 to items outside Transportation, including fireworks, Downtown Ice upgrades, and business-development programs. Rast’s complaint is that the city is asking drivers to pay more while garages still have bad lighting, broken elevators, thin security, and dirty floors, and while the Parking Board has seen late packets and canceled meetings.

The San Jose Downtown Association made the same point in June, when the first version of the hike was yanked off the consent calendar after restaurant and bar owners filled the chambers. Raising the price of a dinner-and-show night without fixing the garage that night ends in is a tax on the recovery downtown has been trying to buy. Staff argue San Jose’s $2 meter is still cheap next to Oakland and San Francisco, and that evening demand now exists. Both can be true. The vote on Tuesday is whether the extra dollar goes into concrete and cameras first, or into the hole in the general fund.

City notice: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/Home/Components/News/News/7535/16

Source: San Jose Spotlight

SoFA Street Fair Takes Over First Street on Sunday

SoFA Street Fair Fall 26 lands Sunday, September 27, from 2 p.m. to about 7:30 p.m. across South First Street and the side streets that make up the SoFA District in Downtown San Jose. The posted grid puts bands, vendors, skate demos, burlesque, and independent wrestling on eight stages at once.

Pobladores Stage and Pobladores Dos sit at 501 South First. Silver Truck Stage is at 454 South First. Project X is at 22 East San Salvador. Haberdasher, 43 West San Salvador, runs rotating burlesque sets from 4 p.m. onward. UGWA Stage at 25 East William hosts the wrestling card, including a title match between Dave Dyra and Journey Fatu at 7. SoFA Market at 387 South First keeps the vendor row. Caravan Stage at 50 West San Salvador closes the night with Sad Boy Sinister at 7:30, while Philthy Dronez Y La Brigada De La Cumbia takes Pobladores at the same time. Gunderson High School Concert Band opens Silver Truck at 2. Skatepops and El Guapo split Project X in the mid-afternoon.

The fair shares the weekend with ILLO Mart two blocks west inside South Hall. Anyone already downtown for prints can walk east and catch a set without a second parking hunt. Start at First and San Salvador and move with the sound. The schedule lives at https://sofafall26.sched.com/

ILLO Mart Packs South Hall With 250-Plus Illustrators This Weekend

San José Made will run the 2nd annual ILLO Mart on Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days inside South Hall at 435 South Market Street in Downtown San Jose. Admission is free. Last year’s first edition proved the city could fill a hall with working illustrators. This year’s floor holds more than 250 booths. Vendor slots sold out. The first 1,000 people through the door each day get an event-only 4-by-6 notepad drawn by @poxei.

The back of the hall is set up for people who want to make something instead of only buying prints. Figure drawing runs all day, first come first served, clothed models, short and long poses. Charcoal and paper are on loan while they last. Jacquelin De Leon leads a $10 digital portrait class at 12:30 both days and a $20 watercolor class at 2:30. Malisa Suchanya’s wooden-mushroom painting slots cycle through the afternoon. Sunday only, Elda The of Thousand Skies teaches 4-by-6 rubber-stamp carving for $20, noon to 2 p.m. and 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., age 12 and up. Four artists run a stamp rally; spend $8 at their tables and collect a set of riso prints at booth E406 while supplies last.

South Hall sits next to the Convention Center garage. Street parking is free on Sunday and the VTA light rail and buses stop within two blocks. No outside food or drink.

Details and workshop reservations: https://www.sanjosemade.com/pages/illo-mart-2026

Kensuke Takahashi Opens His First Northern California Solo Show at Empire Seven

Yokohama painter and muralist Kensuke Takahashi will return to the wall he painted last year, then step inside Empire Seven Studios for Yaoyorozu｜八百万, his first solo exhibition in Northern California. The opening reception runs Saturday, October 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. The show stays up through November 29 at 525 North Seventh Street, Suite 10, on the edge of Japantown.

Takahashi has worked full time as an artist since 2005. During the 2025 San Jose Walls festival he covered the exterior next to the gallery with a family voyage told entirely through Shinto figures. No human bodies appear. A monkey in samurai armor, close to Sarutahiko Ōkami, leads the party with a gourd of sake. A tiger, the Tora, wears a shimenawa rope that marks the line between ordinary ground and sacred space and stands in for a mother’s protection. An egret, the Sagi, carries a taiko drum wrapped in a child’s indigo handkerchief. A three-legged crow, Yatagarasu, travels as a stand-in for a first child and a guide. Takahashi later said the wall came from missing home while painting abroad, then left room for anyone else to invent the rest of the story.

Yaoyorozu, eight million, is an old Japanese way of talking about abundance and the spirits that can live in objects, weather, memory, and people. The gallery is treating the indoor work as a closer look at the same world that already sits on the brick outside. Limited signed prints of the mural will be available; Empire Seven asked collectors to email the studio for the pre-sale list.

Juan Carlos Araujo and Jennifer Ahn have run Empire Seven since 2008, first as a Japantown storefront, later as the producers of San Jose Walls, the local arm of the Worldwide Walls network. Bringing a Yokohama artist back for a two-month solo run is consistent with how they have worked: put a foreign language of myth on a San Jose wall, then give the same artist a room where people can stand still. Walk the mural first if the timing works, then go inside on October 3. Details and collector inquiries live at www.empiresevenstudios.com.

PWHL San Jose Gets a National TV Window Before Opening Night

The Professional Women’s Hockey League locked in its first full-season U.S. television deal with Scripps Sports, which means PWHL San Jose (now called the NorCal Rumble) will arrive at SAP Center already visible in more than 128 million households. ION will carry a Saturday Game of the Week. Scripps Sports Network, the free streaming channel on Roku, Prime Video, Tubi and similar platforms, will add two more national games each week. ION also keeps the Walter Cup Finals and one extra playoff series. Every game will still stream on YouTube and PWHL.com outside Canada.

That package matters here because the local team has not played a minute yet. The league announced San Jose on May 19 as the twelfth franchise and the first in California, part of a four-city expansion class with Detroit, Hamilton, and Las Vegas. Home ice is SAP Center. Practice ice is Sharks Ice. General manager and head coach Troy Ryan has begun signing the draft class; defender Laila Edwards, taken fourth overall in June, put pen to a three-year deal this month. Training camps open November 18. Regular-season puck drop is expected later this year, with the NHL calendar still dictating exact dates around the Sharks and the arena’s renovation work.

Season-ticket deposits of $50 per seat have been collecting since May, time-stamped for priority when packages go on sale. Single-game tickets have not dropped. A nickname is still pending; Hammerheads has been floated in public. What the TV deal buys in the meantime is a Saturday habit. A new club in a busy building cannot wait until the first faceoff to explain who it is. Three national windows a week give casual viewers a reason to find the logo before they find the box office.

San Jose already runs an NHL team, an AHL team, and one of the country’s larger youth hockey footprints. Adding a PWHL club makes the city the only U.S. market with all three rungs on the same civic ice. Interest forms and merch live at https://www.thepwhl.com/en/teams/san-jose.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

San Jose’s Short Film Festival Returns to Santana Row for Its 18th Year

The San Jose International Short Film Festival will occupy Cinemark CinéArts at Santana Row from Thursday, October 22, through Sunday, October 25. Organizers are calling it the largest edition yet, with more than 150 shorts from around the world packed into more than 20 screening blocks. MovieMaker has listed SJSFF among the top 50 festivals worth the entry fee. For four days the recliner seats on Olsen Drive become the city’s window onto work that rarely gets a commercial run.

Thursday used to mean opening night only. This year a new Thursday Pass adds three afternoon blocks before the 7:30 p.m. premiere: And So It Begins at 2 p.m. (drama, comedy, animation, world cinema), A Brave New World at 3 p.m. (avant-garde comedy and drama), and World Cinema One at 4:30 p.m. (seven foreign-language shorts). The same pass covers opening night. Later days split into familiar lanes: two comedy programs including Make ’Em Laugh After Dark, science fiction under The World Beyond, suspense under I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This, plus extra world cinema, documentary, animation, and family blocks. Filmmaker Q&As and nightly receptions sit around the screenings.

A single block ticket is listed at $10 to $15. Day passes that cover every program on one calendar day run $30 to $50. The $175 VIP All-Access pass unlocks every block, the opening-night afterparty, the VIP lounge, a festival shirt, the awards screening, and a commemorative lanyard. Guest of Honor details were still pending as of mid-September.

The theater itself is 4K DCP with surround sound, which is more than most shorts ever see outside a festival. Eighteen years in, SJSFF remains one of the most unique movie experiences of the year. Passes and the full block schedule are at https://sjsff.com/tickets/.

OpenAI Looking at a Power-Heavy Office in San Jose

OpenAI has been circling a 70,000-square-foot building at 2950 Zanker Road in North San Jose, a box whose real prize is not the floor plate but the 19 megawatts of electrical capacity already wired into it. People familiar with the talks said a lease with landlord Peninsula Land & Capital may already be signed. OpenAI did not comment. Roger Fields’ firm bought the property in 2024 after Electric Hydrogen had poured extra power into a site that already sat on a fat electrical feed.

That feed is why the rent under discussion was reported above $6 per square foot per month, more than double the recent asking average for North San Jose research-and-development space. Brokers have been listing ordinary R&D product in the low-to-mid twos. A tenant willing to pay triple that rate is not shopping for cubicles. Colliers has marketed the same address as high-performance industrial space with lab rooms, a data-center designation, five grade-level doors, a fenced yard of nearly 21,000 square feet, and 19 megawatts available, language aimed at hyperscale computing and heavy manufacturing rather than a conventional office user.

North San Jose has spent decades as a semiconductor and R&D corridor along Zanker, First Street, and the airport fringe. Vacancy in the submarket has been elevated while companies handed back older campuses, yet the buildings that already hold serious power have not sat idle. Figure AI, Credo, Archer Aviation, and others have taken large blocks nearby. The same shortage of ready megawatts that pushed Bloom Energy and Heron Power into expansion mode is now pulling AI names toward industrial shells instead of glass campuses. OpenAI has also been linked to a much larger Mountain View office deal; a Zanker lease would be a different kind of footprint, smaller in people and larger in watts.

San Jose officials have treated data-center and high-load users as a tax and utility revenue play when the projects stay inside existing industrial districts. Nineteen megawatts is modest next to the multi-gigawatt campuses OpenAI has announced in Ohio and Georgia, which is part of the point. A 70,000-square-foot building already on the grid can come online without a new substation fight. If the lease closes, North San Jose will have another reminder that the next wave of Silicon Valley demand is arriving first where the wires already are.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Symphony San Jose Opens Its 25th Anniversary Season With America at 250

The California Theatre at 345 South First Street will open Symphony San Jose’s 25th anniversary season on Saturday, October 3 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 4 at 2:30 p.m. The program, titled THE NEW WORLD: America at 250, ties the orchestra’s own milestone to the nation’s 250th year through three works that travel from the mythic West to a brand-new Bay Area premiere and on to Dvořák’s most famous symphony. The same season also marks the California Theatre’s 100th anniversary and 150 years since San Jose first heard an orchestral concert, so the weekend lands with extra weight for anyone who cares about Downtown San Jose’s cultural life.

Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid Suite still does what it has done since 1938: pull folk tunes, open-sky harmonies, and gunslinger swagger into a few tightly scored scenes. After that, pianist Joyce Yang will give the Bay Area its first hearing of Jonathan Leshnoff’s Rhapsody on America, a work Symphony San Jose co-commissioned. Leshnoff wrote the rhapsody as a lyrical, rhythmically restless meditation on the American spirit, and Yang has already introduced it elsewhere in the commissioning consortium. The evening then turns to Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” composed during his years in the United States and still the piece most people reach for when they want landscape, longing, and a big-hearted finish in the same hour.

Ken-David Masur will conduct both performances. The German-born American maestro, recently concluding a long Milwaukee Symphony tenure and a frequent guest with major U.S. orchestras, brings a clear beat and a taste for programs that mix familiar landmarks with living composers. Yang, a Van Cliburn silver medalist known for color and power at the keyboard, sits at the center of the Leshnoff. Together they give the anniversary opener a guest list that matches the occasion.

Saturday night adds an Opening Night Fanfare before the concert: a complimentary sip of champagne, live music, ballet dancers, and extra performances in the lobby as the house fills. Music Notes talks start one hour before each concert inside the auditorium. Adult ticket buyers can add guests age 17 and under at half price; single tickets run $35 to $125, fees included. The whole program lasts about one hour and 50 minutes with intermission.

Tickets and youth pricing details are at www.symphonysanjose.org or 408.286.2600.

Kids Day in the Park Fills Plaza de César Chávez This Afternoon

Bay Area Parent’s Kids Day in the Park lands on the same Downtown lawn that hosts Music in the Park, and the gates open at 11 a.m. today, Sunday, September 20. Entry is through the San Carlos Street side of Plaza de César Chávez, next to the Quetzalcoatl statue. Advance tickets cost nothing. A walk-up ticket at the door runs $20, so reserve a free pass before leaving the house if that is still an option.

Oakland’s Alphabet Rockers headline the stage. Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Soulati Shepherd built the group in 2007 around hip-hop that talks to kids without talking down to them, and the catalog now carries both a Grammy for Best Children’s Music Album and an Emmy. The set is the musical center of a day built for strollers and short attention spans: bounce houses, booths from local organizations and businesses, food trucks, and whatever other activities the organizers packed onto the grass.

A few house rules will save a wasted trip. Outside food, drinks, and water bottles stay in the car. The festival is mostly cashless. Pets other than service animals are out. Chairs are not allowed; blankets smaller than 6 by 8 feet can go on the lawn. Bags should be a clear tote no larger than 12 by 12 by 8 inches or a small clutch. Strollers and wheelchairs are fine, and the plaza is ADA accessible if you flag limited seating in advance. Re-entry is not offered, so treat the afternoon as one continuous stay. Parking sits in nearby garages, including CityView Plaza off Park Avenue and the underground lot at 55 West San Fernando Street.

Downtown San Jose does not get many Sundays that combine a free kids’ festival with a Grammy-winning act on the city’s most familiar outdoor stage. Grab the free ticket, pack a small blanket, and let the bounce houses and the Rockers do the rest. Reserve passes and read the full bag policy at https://www.caltix.com/e/kids-in-the-park-2026/tickets.

Ignite Takes Over the Old Sushi Confidential Corner in San Pedro Square

The sign that once pointed San Pedro Square visitors toward Sushi Confidential or the SAP Center has been covered. In its place, Ignite has already started a soft opening at 26 North San Pedro Street, two weeks after the sushi house served its last rolls at the end of August. Owner Hima Adusumilli is betting the same patio that fed concert and hockey crowds can hold a different kind of night: fire-grilled skewers, smash burgers, wings, bowls, and a cocktail list meant to keep people at the table after dinner.

The room runs about 3,700 square feet inside with a patio of roughly 3,500 square feet opening onto the car-free square. Head chef Felipe Chen is running an early menu that includes an Ignite Smash Burger, loaded nachos, truffle Parmesan fries, balsamic wings, and seafood baskets, with more dishes still arriving. Soft-opening hours have been dinner-first: 4 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, and 3 to 9 p.m. Sunday. A grand opening is set for October 2. The bar poured 11 cocktails and 15 beer taps at launch, and Adusumilli has said nightlife, DJs, and security will follow once the kitchen settles.

About 15 people work the floor and line so far, including eight who stayed on from Sushi Confidential. That continuity matters on a block where regulars already know the faces. Randy Musterer, who built the Sushi Confidential group, framed the exit as a shift toward catering, live action stations, hand-roll bars, and new restaurants elsewhere in the Bay Area, not a retreat from San Jose. The Willow Glen dining room, Campbell and Morgan Hill spots, and the SAP Center stand all remain. Corporate events simply grew faster than one downtown dining room could serve.

A second change is forming a few doors away. The Silk Route Bar and Kitchen will take the two-story, 6,800-square-foot space at 17 North San Pedro Street, the former Olla Cocina site that later hosted a short-lived Bar Tako pop-up and a cancelled Santos Mexican steakhouse plan. Jasbir Singh and Mandeep Jandir, who already run The Brit Sports Pub around the corner, have put nearly $1 million into an upscale Indian dining room and about 25 jobs. They have aimed the concept at a gap Downtown San Jose still has: a full-service Indian kitchen with a real cocktail program, not another quick lunch counter.

Turnover on this stretch can look like loss until the next kitchen lights the patio. San Pedro Square still functions as one of the few places in the city where dinner, a late second round, and a walkable crowd occupy the same block. If Ignite holds the night and Silk Route fills the Indian fine-dining hole this fall, the square will have traded one long-running sushi house for two new reasons to stay out. Hours and menus for Ignite are at www.eatatignite.com. The grand opening is October 2.

Source: SVBJ 

San Jose Reports a Sharp Drop in Homelessness

City Hall released a new estimate this week that the unsheltered population fell about 32 percent in 18 months, from 5,477 people in February 2025 to 3,702 in August 2026. Mayor Matt Mahan tied the change to encampment cleanups, no-re-encampment zones, and a fast buildout of interim rooms: motels, tiny homes, and other emergency beds. ABC7 heard from some residents near Arena Green and the SAP Center who said they now see fewer people living outdoors, even as they added that the crisis has not left the city.

The numbers come from UrbanLogiq, a third-party model that folds in 15 data streams rather than waiting for the federal Point-in-Time count every two years. Those streams include outreach logs, police and fire calls, transportation counts of lived-in vehicles, and Homeless Management Information System records. Officials say the same model counted about 1,500 more unsheltered people than the January 2025 PIT figure of 3,959, which is why they treat the older snapshot as an undercount. The plan is to refresh the estimate every quarter so programs can shift instead of guessing for two years at a stretch.

Housing staff also pointed to capacity that did not exist a short while ago. Reports this week put newly created interim units around 1,000, while a September 15 council briefing described a wider portfolio of roughly 1,820 units and more than 2,200 beds across 22 sites. Lived-in vehicles tracked by the city fell from 960 in fall 2024 to 385 by spring 2026. Resident surveys moved in the same direction: the share of people who named homelessness as the single biggest thing San Jose should change dropped from a peak of 40 percent to 20 percent.

Skeptics asked whether the street feels that different. Advocate Shaunn Cartwright told ABC7 the 32 percent cut does not match what she sees day to day and noted that unhoused deaths last year hit 160, with 2026 on a similar pace. The Mercury News reported that Santa Clara County has not independently reviewed the UrbanLogiq model. The next official PIT count is not due until early 2027, so federal funders may still lean on the older method. City leaders themselves said the people still outside are often the hardest to reach, with addiction and mental health needs that interim beds alone will not settle.

A smaller outdoor population would matter for parks, storefronts, and the everyday walk through Downtown San Jose. It would also matter for the thousands who moved inside if those rooms stay funded and lead somewhere more permanent. The next quarterly run of the model will show whether the line keeps falling or levels off.

Source: ABC News

Sprouts Claims the Old Orchard Supply on Cottle, Opening Early 2028

Sprouts Farmers Market signed a lease for the empty Orchard Supply Hardware box at 5651 Cottle Road. The grocer told the Business Journal it expects to open in early 2028. A public hearing on the remodel is set for September 15. Dollinger Properties bought the 4.3-acre site for $7.3 million in 2025 after the hardware store went dark in 2018.

The work would add about 5,568 square feet to the old building, tear out 1,200 square feet of mezzanine, recut the floor into four tenant spaces, and redo the parking circulation. One of those spaces is slated for a preschool or daycare. Sprouts would not name the operator. Earlier city files had floated a Goddard preschool and a fitness tenant; those plans appear to have shifted toward grocery plus child care.

This would be Sprouts’ sixth store inside San Jose city limits and one of more than twenty in the Bay Area. The lot sits inside Orchard Town and Country, the outdoor center that already holds Baskin-Robbins, Greek Spot, and Castillo’s Mexican Restaurant. Safeway and Target sit close enough that another grocer has to earn the trip. T&T just opened at Westgate. Gus’s is aiming at the old Whole Foods in Los Gatos for 2027. South San Jose is getting the same grocery scramble as the west side.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Hines Files a Plan to Reopen Storefronts on Paseo de San Antonio

Texas-based Hines Interests has asked San Jose to consider a two-track makeover of 150 South First Street, the two-story block that faces South First, South Second, and the Paseo de San Antonio. Eleven empty ground-floor spaces totaling about 31,000 square feet would become Paseo Place. Behind those storefronts, the firm also wants to modernize a data center that sat mostly idle after older equipment went out of date. Hines paid roughly $59.6 million for the 179,800-square-foot building in 2021, its first Downtown San Jose purchase. The site once carried the Pavilion mall name, a late-1980s retail bet that never quite became the Rodeo Drive city leaders hoped for.

Outdoor dining, shade, and new lighting would land on the Paseo. New materials, signs, and a brightly lit clock tower next to the complex are meant to pull eyes toward the walkway that already links the plaza formerly known as Plaza de César Chávez, the Hammer Theatre, and San Jose State. Ownership says it will recruit restaurants and retailers with incentives rather than wait for tenants to wander in. Nearby successes on or near the same paseo, including Scott’s Seafood, Eos & Nyx, and Urban Putt, show the corridor can hold a crowd when the rooms stay open.

The data center piece would be larger and quieter. Equipment installed about 29 years ago would give way to a facility with high-density cooling and tighter emissions controls on emergency generators. Power capacity would rise from about 5 megawatts to 40. City officials have treated new, fully running data centers as a tax source, with estimates in the range of $3.4 million to $6.8 million a year in utility and property taxes for a completed project. Santa Clara County already ranks among the country’s busiest data-center markets. Hines argues the public face of the block would stay retail and pedestrian, even if the floors above and behind the glass do something else.

None of this has a green light yet. The filing, PDC26-016, seeks Early Consideration under the city’s Innovative Project Pathway Program, a route for projects that claim an unusual public benefit even when they sit awkwardly against existing zoning. Early Consideration is feedback, not approval. Council has used the same pathway on other Downtown pairings of data halls and street-level activity. Vacancy remains the everyday problem: more than 70 empty Downtown storefronts turned up in a recent count, and commercial emptiness has hovered near a quarter of the inventory.

A revived Paseo would give students, theatergoers, and office workers a reason to linger between First and Second instead of cutting through a string of dark windows. If the city can extract both a livelier walkway and a steadier tax check from the same parcel, Downtown San Jose gains something it has needed since the Pavilion era ended. The proposal still has to survive public review. For more on the filing and the city’s large-energy project list, see the City of San Jose Planning Division page for data centers and the September 11, 2026 Mercury News report.

Source: The Mercury News

Chagee Adds a Westgate Shop This Winter After Valley Fair

Chagee Modern Tea House will open a second Northern California store at 1600 Saratoga Avenue inside Westgate Center this winter. The suite is 1,543 square feet, next to the new T&T Supermarket. The larger Valley Fair shop, about 2,500 square feet, is still slated for fall and is billed as the regional flagship. Two San Jose locations in one season puts the brand on both sides of West San Jose without a long drive between them.

The chain already runs most of its California shops in the south. These two bring the state count to 11. Loyalty members account for more than half of company revenue, and the Valley Fair room is supposed to carry the full spend-based program and the custom digital layer. Westgate may or may not get the same build-out. Either way, a tea counter next to T&T is a different errand than a mall destination at Valley Fair.

Westgate’s own marketing cites a daytime population of 197,254 inside three miles and an average household income of $246,773. That is the math behind putting a premium tea brand beside a large Asian grocer instead of waiting for another downtown lease. Saratoga Avenue already has Gong Cha in the same center. Chagee is aiming higher on price and presentation. No opening date besides “winter” has been posted. 

Brand site: https://chagee.us/

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Five Casts of Shrek Jr. Take Over Hoover Theater from September 25

Playful People Productions will run Shrek the Musical Jr. at Historic Hoover Theater, 1635 Park Avenue, from September 25 through October 4. Two age bands share the stage across the ten days: performers five to twelve in one set of casts, twelve to seventeen in the other. Shannon Santandrea and Emily Pennington co-direct. The score is Jeanine Tesori’s, the book David Lindsay-Abaire’s, shortened for young companies but still built around an ogre who would rather stay in his swamp than rescue a princess for Lord Farquaad.

Five named casts split the calendar so families can pick a time that actually works. Castle Cast opens Friday the 25th at 7 p.m., then plays Saturday the 26th at 3 and Sunday the 27th at 11. Duloc Cast takes Saturday the 26th at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., plus Sunday the 27th at 3. The second weekend belongs to Parfait, Swamp, and Onion, with Friday the 2nd starting at 5 and 8 p.m. and Sunday the 4th stretching from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Check the ticket page before buying; each listing names its cast.

Tickets sit at $20 for youth twelve and under, $23 for students thirteen to seventeen, and $28 for adults. The City of San José Cultural Affairs grant and SVCreates money, in partnership with Santa Clara County, help keep those prices in family range. Playful People has worked out of Hoover since the company formed in 2010 and became a 501(c)(3) in 2017. The same shop still runs adult classes and multi-generational shows when a script allows relatives on the same bill.

Tickets: https://www.playfulpeople.org/tickets

Company info: https://www.playfulpeople.org or (408) 878-5362

A Family Grocer and a New Gym Fill Cornerstone in Los Gatos

South and West San Jose shoppers will soon have two new reasons to pull into Cornerstone Shopping Center. Family-owned Gus’s Community Market signed on for the 18,125-square-foot space Whole Foods left behind at 15980 Los Gatos Blvd., with an opening targeted for April or May 2027. Club Studio Fitness is slated to open this September in the former Rite Aid at 15920 Los Gatos Blvd.

Gus’s will be the first store the Vardakastanis family has opened outside San Francisco, where five markets already serve neighborhoods from the Haight to Mission Bay. The Los Gatos shop will carry produce, full-service meat and seafood, sushi, specialty groceries, beer and wine, plus extras the SF stores do not yet have: house-baked breads, customizable prepared-food bowls, and a café with an indoor-outdoor patio. Landlord Cilker put about $2.5 million into the two spaces and now reports the center at full occupancy, with neighbors that include Hanna’s Noodle Bar, SkinSpirit and Shepherd & Sims.

The grocery map along that stretch keeps shifting. Whole Foods moved into a larger building a short drive away. Nob Hill Foods, a fixture less than a mile from Cornerstone, plans to close in June 2027 after its parent company declined to renew the lease. Lunardi’s remains nearby. Cilker’s team picked Gus’s for a smaller, service-heavy model rather than another big-box format, betting that shoppers from Almaden, Cambrian and Willow Glen will notice the difference in the aisle and at the counter.

Club Studio brings boutique classes, a full gym floor and wellness amenities under one membership. The Orange County-based chain signed a 10-year lease; Gus’s signed 15 years with options. Together the two leases turn a pair of empty boxes into a grocery-and-workout stop that sits a quick hop from southern San Jose neighborhoods.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

San José Chamber Orchestra Opens Its 36th Season by Handing Off the Baton

Barbara Day Turner will leave the podium after 35 seasons as founder of the San José Chamber Orchestra. Concertmaster Liana Bérubé takes the title of Music Director for season 36. The handoff concert is Sunday, September 27, at 7 p.m. at St. Francis Episcopal Church, 1205 Pine Avenue in Willow Glen. The program is called “Brava, Maestra!” Street parking around the church is free and usually adequate on a Sunday night.

Turner’s ledger is the reason the evening exists. More than 260 commissions or premieres. Seven CDs of American music. Five ASCAP/League of American Orchestras Adventurous Programming Awards. The ensemble is a professional string group of twenty-plus players that still treats new work as normal rather than a special occasion. City Cultural Affairs money and SVCreates funds, with the County and the California Arts Council, help keep that habit alive.

Bérubé will conduct and play. The bill is Jeremy Cohen’s “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” Marc-Olivier Dupin’s Variations on La Traviata with Bérubé as violin soloist, Steven Mark Kohn’s Hymn for string orchestra, Michael Touchi’s Tango Barroco with David Cortez on soprano saxophone and Adrienne Malley on English horn, and Max Wolpert’s “Lid un Tantsn,” String Quartet No. 3. None of it is a greatest-hits night. It is the kind of program Turner spent three decades training this room to play.

Tickets run $25 for students, $65 or $75 for seniors 62 and up, and $75 or $85 for adults, with no added fees. Buy online, call 408.295.4416, email the box office, or pay at the door. The rest of the season stays at St. Francis: November 15, New Year’s afternoon with Jon Nakamatsu, then dates in March, April, and May.

Tickets: https://sjco.org/

Phone: 408.295.4416

Candlelit Evening of Ennio Morricone Scores Arrives at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph

The unforgettable film music of Ennio Morricone will fill the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in Downtown San Jose on Thursday, October 29, when a candlelit piano and strings program makes its California premiere. Five musicians—a string quartet and pianist—will perform a 70-minute selection of the composer’s most iconic scores beneath the basilica’s great dome, with doors opening at 7:00 p.m. and the concert beginning at 7:30 p.m.

Listeners can expect themes that have stayed with audiences long after the credits rolled, including the haunting whistle and guitar of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the soaring Ecstasy of Gold, the tender melodies from Cinema Paradiso, Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission, and selections from Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Untouchables, and more. The intimate arrangement lets every phrase and silence register clearly inside the resonant space.

Candlelight, a specially designed lighting installation, and the basilica’s historic architecture will frame the music. The building, whose parish roots reach back to 1803 and whose present structure dates to 1877, offers stained-glass windows, a rare 1886 Odell organ, and acoustics that give the scores an added luminous quality. The production, which has already toured European cathedrals and concert halls, arrives in San Jose as a quiet, focused alternative to larger orchestral evenings.

Tickets start at $45 and are available through Eventbrite. Public parking sits in nearby Downtown garages, and early arrival is recommended. This single evening offers a chance to experience cinema’s most memorable melodies in one of the city’s most striking sacred spaces.

Tickets and further details are available on Eventbrite.

XL Bar Files In at the Old Renegades Address on Taylor Street

A tavern-style spot called XL Bar is slated for the 1,440-square-foot room at 501 W. Taylor St., the address Renegades occupied until May. California ABC records list Erika Dominguez as the applicant for a Type 48 on-sale liquor license. A window permit still shows the space is not yet licensed to pour. Management did not comment when reporters called.

The building sits across from San Jose Market Center, the busy cluster anchored by Target, Marshalls, Sprouts and Trader Joe’s, a short hop from Downtown San Jose’s core. Foot traffic from grocery runs and evening errands could feed a neighborhood tavern if the license clears and the doors open.

Renegades closed May 8 after the death of longtime owner Luis Sarmiento. Staff and regulars tried to keep the room going. A May post from the bar’s account said the landlords had chosen a different tenant. Whether XL Bar’s operators had any role in that decision remains unclear. Renegades had served as one of San Jose’s last dedicated gay bars, a home for karaoke, drag nights and softball teams since the 1970s.

The city’s queer nightlife map is thinner than it once was. San Jose counted about 14 gay bars in earlier decades. Splash and Mac’s Club still operate on Post Street inside the Qmunity District. Those two rooms now carry more of the late-night weight for LGBTQ+ residents and visitors. Anyone who misses the Taylor Street circle can still find drag, dancing and a patio a few blocks closer to City Hall.

A new tavern next to a grocery center is ordinary city news until the license posts and the lights go on. What matters for San Jose is whether the block stays lively and whether the Qmunity District keeps getting the crowds it earned. Stop by Post Street in the meantime.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Mid-Autumn Festival (Tết Trung Thu) Comes to Grand Century on September 26

Mid-Autumn Festival, Tết Trung Thu in Vietnamese, falls on Friday, September 25 this year. Story Road is marking it the next afternoon. Visit San Jose lists Mid-Autumn Festival Bay Area at Grand Century Mall, 1111 Story Road, starting at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 26. The mall sits in Little Saigon, the stretch of East San Jose filled with delicious bánh mì shops and herbal stores.

The event features free lanterns for children, music, performances, games, food, and storytelling. There is a mooncake giveaway along with free gifts for the first 500 families along with live music and cultural performances.

Grand Century is indoor-outdoor and already crowded on weekends. Arrive after 4 if the goal is lanterns after the heat drops. Bring cash for mall vendors if you want the best deals.

The same Saturday also has a morning Moon Festival at Children’s Discovery Museum, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with Yun Yee Tong lion dance and playdough mooncakes. Andrew P. Hill High School will hold its large children’s Moon Festival on September 19.

Visit San Jose listing: https://www.sanjose.org/events/mid-autumn-festival-bay-area

Story Road events: https://www.visitstoryroad.org/events1

Five Wounds Plan Would Stack 8,000 Homes Around a Future BART Stop

The City published the draft Environmental Impact Report for the Five Wounds Urban Village Plan in mid-August. Comments on the draft plan itself are due Friday, October 2. The umbrella document folds four older village plans into one 427-acre map: Five Wounds, Little Portugal, Roosevelt Park, and 24th and William. The box runs from King Road to Coyote Creek and from Lower Silver Creek down to East San Fernando, East William, and East San Antonio. The reason for the rewrite is the planned 28th Street / Little Portugal BART station.

Housing capacity inside that box would rise from about 2,022 units to 8,022. Job capacity would fall from about 4,855 to 2,500. Commercial floor area is pegged at 750,000 square feet. Buildings could reach 270 feet near the station, with a public plaza and mobility hub on the BART site. Density is meant to sit on East Julian and McKee and inside the four old village cores, not on every bungalow lot.

That swap, more homes and fewer office jobs, matches what the city has been doing near Diridon and Downtown San Jose. East Santa Clara already has Five Wounds Portuguese National Church, small grocers, and a lot of one- and two-story commercial. The plan text talks about keeping existing neighborhoods, small businesses, and housing while new construction lands at the station. Whether 270-foot towers next to that church feel like preservation will be the argument at Planning Commission and Council later this year.

VTA is a partner. Berryessa / North San José BART already exists a few miles north. This station would put Little Portugal on the same line. If the EIR holds and Council adopts the plan in late 2026, the zoning change is the thing that lets those 6,000 extra units get entitled. The buildings themselves will take years after that.

Send comments to 5W@sanjoseca.gov by October 2. The draft plan and EIR live on the city’s Five Wounds Urban Village page.

City page: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/fivewoundsuvp

YIMBY summary: https://sfyimby.com/2026/09/draft-eir-published-for-five-wounds-urban-village-plan-san-jose.html

Alaska Puts Four Daily 737s Back on the LAX–SJC Run in November

Alaska Airlines will restore San Jose–Los Angeles on November 1 after a ten-month gap. The airline first added the hop in 2017, then dropped it in January 2026 when new aircraft arrived later than planned. The replacement is not the old 76-seat Embraer E175. Four daily flights each way will use a 173-seat Boeing 737-900ER, 157 seats in economy and 16 in first, which more than doubles the metal on each departure.

Published times out of SJC start at 7:00 a.m., then 11:22 a.m., 5:15 p.m., and 7:55 p.m. LAX sends aircraft at 9:00 a.m., 2:55 p.m., 5:35 p.m., and 7:45 p.m. Block time sits a little over an hour. That schedule gives a same-day outbound and return without forcing a drive to SFO or a connection. Southwest and others already sell the corridor; another four frequencies still matter when a meeting in El Segundo or a late show at the Hollywood Bowl is the reason for the trip.

The same network shuffle cuts seven other Alaska routes. Santa Rosa loses Salt Lake City and Ontario. San Luis Obispo–Las Vegas and Sacramento–Los Cabos are gone. Seasonal Puerto Vallarta flying from Sacramento, St. Louis, and JFK already ended in April. Those markets are smaller. LAX–SJC is the one Alaska chose to put a mainline jet back on.

SJC Terminal B is where Alaska usually parks. Mileage Plan members get the first-class cabin and the usual elite perks that regional jets do not carry as comfortably. Fares will move with Southwest and the rest of the market, but more competition means downward pressure on prices. Bookings are already live on Alaska’s site for dates from November 1.

Alaska bookings: https://www.alaskaair.com/en/flights-from-los-angeles-to-san-jose

Source: Simply Flying

The Circle of Palms Lost Its Palms. Downtown Still Owns the Ground.

Contractors cut down all 32 palm trees at the Circle of Palms Plaza on Aug. 20 and finished the job by the next afternoon. The ring sat between the San Jose Museum of Art, Signia by Hilton San Jose and 50 West. City arborists found 15 trees dead or dying and the rest in decline. Some leaned. Lab samples went out to identify the cause. Removal ran about $45,000 and skipped the usual notice period because falling trunks posed an immediate risk.

The palms themselves dated to late-1980s downtown redevelopment. The ground under them is older. California Historical Landmark No. 461 marks the site of the first State Capitol, where the legislature met from 1849 to 1851. A state seal still sits in the pavement. For decades the circle hosted CityDance, holiday lights and Downtown Ice, the outdoor rink that wrapped around those trunks every winter.

Poppy & Claro opened last year on the ground floor of 50 West and built its name around the plaza. Neighbors who work or eat there now look at an open disk of concrete instead of a green ring. District 3 Councilmember Anthony Tordillos asked the city to pause, gather stakeholders and run a real public process before anyone plants the next idea. The San Jose Downtown Association called the empty plaza a chance to rethink what the space should do for people who live, work and visit the core.

That conversation belongs to anyone who has skated there in December, walked through after a museum show or grabbed lunch on the edge of the circle. New trees, different shade, a redesigned floor, or a layout that still holds an ice rink are all on the table once feedback starts. Tordillos hoped that work would begin before the year ends.

Downtown San Jose already proved it can turn a historic capitol site into a living room. The palms are gone. The landmark, the seal and the habit of gathering there remain. Readers who want a say should watch city and Downtown Association channels for the first workshop dates.

Additional information will come from the City of San Jose Transportation Department and the San Jose Downtown Association as the outreach calendar is set.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal