If you wish to go for a peaceable hike in San Jose, you go to Alum Rock or Almaden Quicksilver parks. If you would like some family-friendly competition enjoyable, Plaza de Cesar Chavez is the place for you. However if you wish to stir issues up, you’re going to St. James Park.
This weekend, the downtown park was set to be the location of a protest in opposition to President Trump’s insurance policies. Saturday’s deliberate “Rage Against the Regime” demonstration at midday was simply the newest in a protracted line of political statements and actions which have been made in St. James Park — together with at the least two high-profile anti-Trump protests this 12 months.
A band performs on the base of the McKinley statue in St. James Park throughout the “No Kings” protest on June 14, 2025 in downtown San Jose. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Space Information Group)
It’s the place President William McKinley spoke to a crowd that overflowed onto First Avenue in Could 1901, 4 months earlier than his assassination. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy addressed one other enormous crowd within the park throughout his temporary run for president in 1968. He, too, was killed by an murderer’s bullet weeks later in Los Angeles. Monuments to the 2 very completely different political figures are integral elements of the park at the moment and have typically been the staging level for different speeches and demonstrations.
For many years, Plaza de Cesar Chavez — or Plaza Park, because it was then recognized — was overwhelmed by the previous Metropolis Corridor constructing and has since taken on a extra celebratory function for town. Whereas there have been many gatherings, vigils, protests and celebrations on the new Metropolis Corridor’s concrete plaza dealing with Santa Clara Avenue, its capability is dwarfed by St. James Park.
A statue of President William McKinley in St. James Park, photographed in 2017, commemorates the spot the place he spoke in downtown San Jose in Could 1901. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Space Information Group)
That capability is among the pure benefits that’s made St. James Park a magnet for large occasions. Its broad, open areas can accommodate swelling crowds, and its location put it on the heart of civic life. In its lengthy historical past, it has been surrounded by three church buildings (two are nonetheless energetic), a lodge, a publish workplace, a former Scottish Ceremony temple, the elite St. Clare Membership and a courthouse, which at one level included the county jail.
That courthouse, after all, figured into one in all San Jose’s darkest chapters, because it was the place an indignant mob went to seize Harold Thurman and John Holmes, two males accused of the 1933 kidnapping and homicide of Brooke Hart, a Santa Clara graduate who was the son of the Hart’s division retailer proprietor. A mass of 1000’s crowded into St. James Park because the pair have been stripped, crushed and hanged from two bushes.
The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Discussion board, photographed in 2018, was put in in St. James Park in April 1970, two years after the U.S. senator and presidential candidate spoke there in downtown San Jose, two months earlier than his assassination in Los Angeles. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Space Information Group)
Clyde Arbuckle’s “History of San Jose” recounts that throughout the Nice Melancholy, radicals protested the nation’s financial ills whereas passing the hat among the many gullible, whereas at different instances, “hell-fire and brimstone evangelists” condemned sinners from park-bench pulpits.
However the park was a spot to start out actions, too. In 1976, greater than 300 individuals attended San Jose’s first Homosexual Freedom Rally and Dance at St. James Park, which turned the location of Homosexual Pleasure occasions for the subsequent 4 years. For many years, efforts by San Jose church buildings and nonprofits — and even the costumed do-gooder referred to as Batman of San Jose — to dress and feed town’s homeless inhabitants centered across the park.
Immediately, plans are nonetheless floating round Metropolis Corridor to revitalize St. James Park, together with the addition of a Levitt Pavilion stage to host no fewer than 50 free occasions yearly. For those who squint, you may see the Pals of Levitt Pavilion’s live performance collection — the subsequent one is Sunday with Valley Wolf and Ritmos Tropicosmos — as a type of protest, or at the least the beginning of one other motion to persuade individuals {that a} live performance stage at St. James Park is a worthwhile funding.
Truthfully, anybody who thinks St. James Park isn’t a pure place for a stage most likely hasn’t paid consideration to its historical past.
TRIBUTE IN BRONZE: I just lately wrote concerning the honors being bestowed upon Kevin Hauge, the retiring creative director of Kids’s Musical Theatre of San Jose, together with the dedication of the Montgomery Theater courtyard in his honor. Thursday evening, one other tribute was unveiled in entrance of associates, relations and colleagues at a retirement social gathering held on the James Grain Warehouse occasion house off West San Carlos Avenue.
Kids’s Musical Theater San Jose Creative Director Kevin Hauge appears at a miniature bronze likeness of himself created by artist Charlie DiNapoli, second from proper, as San Jose Metropolis Councilmember Michael Mulcahy and emcee Andy Ferrara look on. The statue was unveiled at a retirement social gathering for Hauge held on the James Grain Warehouse occasion house in San Jose on Thursday, July 31, 2025. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Space Information Group)
This one is a bronze likeness of Hauge sitting in a director’s chair that was sculpted and forged by artist Charlie DiNapoli, a Santa Clara College grad. The paintings was commissioned by Shirlee DiNapoli Schiro — Charlie’s great-aunt — earlier than she died in September 2024 and might be displayed at CMT San Jose’s rehearsal corridor on Parkmoor Avenue.
STUDIO VISIT: Diane Brandenburg bought an in depth look final month at one of many many nonprofit initiatives she has funded via the Brandenburg Household Basis when she paid a go to to the ArtHouse Studio camp on the King Library in downtown San Jose. Brandenburg — an artist herself whose work have been proven on the Triton Museum of Artwork in Santa Clara — sat with the third- to fifth-grade college students on July 22 as they labored on their very own watercolor work.
Whereas the camp is over now, ArtHouse Studio CEO and founder Julie Stover is gearing up for the varsity 12 months, when the nonprofit brings arts training to under-resourced faculties and school rooms within the valley. You’ll be able to try at www.arthousestudioca.org.
MEMORIES OF VAHL’S: My current column on Vahl’s restaurant and bar in Alviso spurred plenty of reminiscences amongst readers, together with Santa Clara Valley Water District Director Richard Santos. He labored for Amelia Vahl, who was nice associates together with his dad, and he remembers when Gov. Pat Brown stopped in to eat.
Milpitas resident Invoice Ott says that when he was working for Wells Fargo on Abbott Avenue again within the Nineteen Sixties, Eric Vahl used to herald the restaurant’s deposit in an enormous fabric sack. And later, when Ott labored on the Ford plant — on the location of the Nice Mall at the moment — the employees would head to Vahl’s for lunch most days.
In the meantime, John Doll says his grandmother knew Amelia Vahl fairly effectively and they might go to the restaurant on particular events for many years. “There was at all times an intense dialogue on the finish of a meal as a result of Amelia insisted that my household didn’t pay,stated Doll, who additionally wonders if which may have been as a result of his dad was a choose and each time he was confronted with a hung jury, he despatched the jurors to Vahl’s.
By the best way, Doll famous that Amelia Vahl used to function the now-demolished Costa Resort in San Jose earlier than she and her husband opened Vahl’s in 1941. Doll wrote a weblog publish concerning the previous Italian lodges within the space — together with the Torino Resort, which turned Henry’s Hello-Life — that you would be able to learn at www.johndollbooks.com/publish/italian-immigrant-hotels.
