On Paseo de San Antonio, even free hamburgers could not stop the fountain from roaring back to life—at least in memory.
Just about every block of downtown San Jose has its own decades-long history of repeated creation and destruction. Developers and politicians wipe out entire blocks, only to wipe them out all over again 20 years later. Paseo de San Antonio is no different.
Last week, following a ribbon cutting to celebrate the transformation of the old Fairmont Annex into student housing—now redubbed Spartan Village on the Paseo—a block party took place between Second Street and San Jose State University. The former Circle-A Skateboard Shop location, now Campus Burgers, doled out free hamburgers.
In order to shatter spacetime, my brain revived some memories. An old fountain came roaring, or perhaps I should say bubbling, right back to life.
Where Campus Burgers now sits, a gargantuan 18-foot brutalist sculptural fountain once graced the paseo, where it connected to a multilevel gathering area with trees and grassy medians. It was an incomplete project. The fountain was originally supposed to connect to a pedestrian overpass that crossed Third Street, which was never built.
In 1975, San Jose Mayor Janet Gray Hayes officially opened the fountain, declaring a “renaissance” for downtown San Jose, which was then a sketchy half-boarded-up neighborhood often populated by drunks, unhoused people and low-income students. There were cracked parking lots and various crumbling retail leftovers from the ’60s. The city claimed the fountain would help trigger a downtown revitalization, which, of course, never happened.
The fountain was a total disaster from the start. Homeless people bathed in the water, fully nude. Pranksters tossed laundry soap into the complex, creating tons of suds. Teenagers, including some I later knew, climbed all over the fountain and drank beer, leaving cans and other garbage everywhere.
“Bums regularly urinated in the fountain,” wrote the Merc’s Scott Herhold in 1986. “And it became a catchall for bottles, leaves and newspapers. But the setting and design—a kind of Stonehenge look—attracted the most criticism.”
Barely more than a decade after the $2.5 million fountain was dedicated, city officials had already decided it needed to go. At this time, the next mayor, Tom McEnery, along with redevelopment czar Frank Taylor, deemed the fountain a tragic mistake. It impeded their plans for a full-blown walkable shopping-mall ecosystem along the paseo, which, of course, also never happened.
“Has this city no sense of permanency?” wrote the Merc, in a scathing editorial that same year. “Must San Jose really recycle public works as though they were beer cans?”
Continuing, the Merc turned to Italy for inspiration: “We concede that in the world of fountains, a certain amount of change is probably inevitable. Rome’s Trevi Fountain was thoroughly redesigned, for example. But that was in 1732, after the original fountain had stood since 1453. In three centuries, a design can grow tiresome. But in one decade?”
Not everyone hated the brutalist monstrosity. SJSU Professor Hal Todd, who to this day has a university theater named after him, wrote a letter to the editor claiming the fountain was the only cheering sight on his way to the campus through downtown for the past 10 years. In his letter, Todd even quoted Horace of ancient Rome, who merely wanted “a portion of land not so very large, but which should contain a garden and … a spring of ever-flowing water and a bit of forest to complete it.”
Not one for “the smoke, the grandeur and the noise of Rome,” Horace took to the suburbs, coming to the city as seldom as possible where all too often, “for every folly of their officials, the people feel the scourge.”
Todd quoted all of this in his letter in support of the fountain. Man.
Somewhere around the late ’80s, the fountain was finally demolished, yet many people remember it. Just last year, when Circle-A Skate Shop still occupied the kiosk where Campus Burgers now sits, the shop opened an exhibit of skateboard photography, including several decades-old shots of people skating on portions of the fountain. There were many oddball railings, levels and surfaces that attracted skaters.
While I am grateful for cheap hamburgers, I, too, feel the scourge.
Great read, Gary.