LAST WEEK in this space, I notified readers of the “Lost San Jose” art show taking place this Saturday at Blues Jean Bar in Santana Row. A few more aspects of the situation need to be navigated, so allow me to add some further comments. While Josh Marcotte’s photos do indeed beautifully capture crumbling pieces of San Jose, he unfortunately wasn’t able to include any shots of the old Town & Country Village shopping center, which was flattened almost exactly 10 years ago to build Santana Row. Most of us were around during that time, but the history is fun stuff to yak about.
In 1998, when the wrecking balls appeared imminent, San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer declared that Santana Row would “pose no threat to downtown businesses.” So the land was sold, and the shopping center destroyed, along with four decades of Town & Country memories. The mall had long since fallen into a state of decrepitude, so many folks, perhaps fittingly, said “goodbye and good riddance,” but the memories remain. What a place.
First the background: Four Town & Country Village shopping centers originally graced the Bay Area landscape decades ago. The first one opened in Palo Alto in the early ’50s. The one at Stevens Creek and Winchester came along in 1960, followed a few years later by equivalents in Sunnyvale and in Marin County.
My generation has fond memories of the very first Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre restaurant, which opened in Town & Country Village in San Jose in 1977. It was eventually one of the first places where we could play video games. Nolan Bushnell of Atari and Pong fame started the whole shootin’ match, pioneering the suburban, family pizza arcade experience.
It could only have happened in the ’70s, in Silicon Valley. An entire generation of kids, including me, was never the same afterward. Moving into the ’80s, it seemed like everyone who came of age during those days knew someone who knew someone else who knew a girl whose stoner boyfriend had a job dressing up in the rat costume at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Town & Country Village was also the home of Books Inc., for years the best independent bookstore in San Jose. That store had possibly the most comprehensive occult section of any bookstore in Santa Clara County. The art and music sections were equally as far-reaching and sublime. The Borders store now in Santana Row pales in comparison and has absolutely no character whatsoever.
If anyone desires to know every single tenant that occupied a space in Town & Country Village in any given year, it just takes some casual research. The San Jose Mercury News used to publish a yearly Shopping Mall Guide to Santa Clara Valley. A few back issues exist in the California Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Main Library.
If you want to see a picture of what Mt. Pleasant Shopping Center looked like in 1967, the photos are in there. Likewise, if you want to see a list of every single shop in Princeton Plaza in 1975, along with the square footage of each place, the issue for that year contains the information. For example, in the 1979 entry for Town & Country Village, we find six shoe stores, 12 household retail shops, a handful of jewelers and five airline offices, including Hughes Air West. That same year, the total area of the Town & country Village parcel was 50.5 acres, the “area developed” was 268,000 square feet, the total units occupied added up to 111 and the parking capacity was 1,000 cars. This is rocking stuff, folks. Aren’t you glad you know all this now? We’re talking about Lost San Jose at its finest.
This is precisely why Josh Marcotte decided to start photo-documenting everything that will soon be forgotten. You can see a solo show of his work this Saturday at the Blues Jean Bar in Santana Row, as well as more photos in a larger show at the Kaleid Gallery in downtown San Jose—right at the corner of Fourth and San Fernando. Actually, that corner used to be a Vietnamese restaurant called Quoc Te …
