I wanted to see this celebrated fence with my own two eyes to understand what all the controversy has been about—why it ran in the Rose Garden Resident, then as the lead story of the Mercury News’ local section, followed by a piece on San Jose Inside. The media fascination with a minor boundary squabble, cast in the David and Goliath mold of big, bad developer versus the trampled neighbors, appeared at first read like a bit of media sensationalism.  So I drove up San Carlos Street for a site visit to the as yet unnamed townhouse construction site in a part of town that is definitely not the Rose Garden neighborhood, as articles have claimed.

BEGINNING this weekend at Discovery Meadow, San Jose gets its first primordial high-tech preview of what’s to come during next month’s second biennial ZeroOne (01SJ) Global Festival of Art on the Edge. In conjunction with Black Rock Arts Foundation, artist Peter Hudson and a squad of at least 50 dedicated pals have created Homouroboros, a 24-foot-tall, 30-foot-diameter spinning zoetrope that depicts 18 life-size monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a circle around the tree, eating an apple fed to them by a serpentlike hand. The interactive steel and aluminum sculpture debuts Saturday from 4 to 6pm and will close a month later.

As a longtime baseball fan, I can understand why it’s known as the “game of inches.” I had no idea that the same rule applied to the real estate development industry. Neither did 17 residents of the Rose Garden around the old Fiesta Lanes site under development into high density housing by ROEM Builders of Santa Clara, until they received a letter from the company last month.

Long before the Vietnam War, San Jose had its own well-known Italian enclave called Little Italy. And way before the Vietnamese were pushing to call the Vietnamese retail area Little Saigon, the Italian community had already started working on a plan to revive Little Italy and call it just that. But as you can imagine, nobody at City Hall wants to touch that one.

It seems that this council, most of it anyway, means what it says; it held the line against the conversion of five acres of industrial land to housing. Nice job, team.  The war will never be won until developers believe that the council will not buckle under the joint pressure of too much money and too little staff backbone. It must be won battle by battle.

On May 12, 2008, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office dropped the charges against the last of the “Eastside Six”—a group that faced numerous misdemeanors and felonies from an incident on Cinco de Mayo, 2006. But don’t let the romantic lefty throwback name fool you; these were not a bunch of armed Black Panthers planning a City Hall takeover, but, rather, peaceful community activists who were only armed with cameras and bullhorns.

We live in a rat race and sometimes I don’t know how to get out of it. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to visit friends in Hawaii for a few days in the past week. Now back in San Jose from paradise, I really feel the differences in lifestyle between the two.

The Puck Stops Here

The Sharks’ season ended a little over a week ago in a thrilling playoff game that was decided in the fourth overtime period.  The Sharks were picked by many experts to get to the Stanley Cup Finals.  Some had the Sharks winning the whole thing.

City Hall Diary

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my biggest regret as an elected official: my support last year of the unanimous vote that converted commercial property to residential on Lincoln Ave—820 units to be exact.  Going forward, I will vote on what is best for San Jose and our future.

Fatal Injury During Precinct Walk Overshadows Supervisor Race

George Shirakawa, Jr., the presumptive favorite in the race for supervisor in District 2, was tragically euthanized on Sunday as he lay on a lonely sidewalk of a cul-de-sac with two broken ankles during a weekend precinct walk.

WITH all the recent spats about historical preservation and my fond retro-kitsch memories of downtown San Jose’s old Woolworth Building, I felt like a higher cosmic intelligence was directing me southbound to fill the hole in my soul when I discovered a redevelopment mecca in Ventura County—the Woolworth Museum. Someone in downtown Oxnard, Calif., had restored that city’s old Woolworth building and turned it into a museum, so I just had to make a spiritual trek and investigate the place.

Cinco de Mayo weekend is a nightmare if you are a resident of downtown San Jose, an employee of a downtown business, or someone attempting to attend a downtown play, concert, movie or other non-Cinco de Mayo event. However, it’s not because of what you might think. It’s true that there are many people and a lot of noise and traffic, but that happens almost every weekend. The problem is the San Jose Police Department who throw up roadblocks at all downtown freeway exits and many city streets, making it virtually impossible to enter downtown from the outside world.

Exactly which May 1 march in support of immigrant rights did Merc reporters supposedly go to? The daily reported that the annual march wound “from East San Jose to City Hall,” which is downright bizarre since the biggest behind-the-scenes drama of the day came when the SJPD blocked off City Hall’s plaza.

There is much to be concerned about in San Jose these days. We have seen this before in the early seventies, when the vaunted SJPD of today was not quite that organization. It was undertrained and poorly led. Its relationship with the minority community was fragile and the composition of the force did not reflect the makeup of our city. That all changed with the selection of Joe McNamara as chief in 1976, and his particular brand of leadership.