As the wheels of progress begin to chip away at Parkside Hall behind the Tech Interactive, I cannot help but raise the ghosts of rock stars and vacuums.
A shiny new project, Park Habitat, is slated to emerge on this very spot and it looks pretty rocking. However, any natural urban explorer with experience in this neighborhood will immediately contemplate the absurdity of the ever-shifting landscape. In San Jose’s case, the city moves buildings around like chess pieces, crushes whatever it doesn’t want in any particular decade, and then repeats the whole process ten years later. This has been going on for at least half a century.
To wit: Upon its debut in 1977, the building now called Parkside Hall was the first modern convention center that San Jose tried to build from scratch. By then, the Civic Auditorium had deteriorated into a rundown arena for professional wrestling, high school graduations or similar lowbrow events. At the time, a brand-new, much-heralded public library had just emerged on the other side of San Carlos. House of Pizza was in its old location before it moved a few blocks down the street. What’s now the Hyatt Place was a Holiday Inn that Lew Wolff built a few years earlier—the only new downtown hotel at the time.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1968, with downtown San Jose already in perpetual decline, a whopping 44 civic leaders in search of an identity journeyed to Anaheim, where they saw that city’s successful convention center complex. They were so blown away, they came back demanding San Jose build something similar. The first half of the ’70s was then spent hiring architects, paying consultants, arguing over budgets and thrashing out plans, all of which resulted in San Jose settling for a bunker-like exhibit space behind the Civic Auditorium, but set back from the corner of Market Street and Park Avenue, and with an outdoor sunken amphitheater in front of the place, right where the Tech Interactive now sits.
Mayor Janet Gray Hayes opened the new San Jose Convention Center in the fall of 1977. At the time, the building included meeting spaces, conference rooms and an exhibit hall. It connected to the Civic Auditorium via an outdoor plaza in the back, some of which still remains.
It would be another decade, in the ’80s, before the city then wiped out the entire neighborhood south of San Carlos to build the current convention center, which opened in 1989. When that happened, the original convention center behind the Civic Auditorium was then renamed Parkside Hall. The Tech Museum then went up in the ’90s, seamlessly adjoining the former front entrance of Parkside Hall, which the museum subsequently then used for temporary exhibits devoted to Genghis Khan, Leonardo Da Vinci and Star Wars. Then Mayor Ron Gonzales built the giant blue and white tent south of the new convention center as a temporary “expansion” until the public library could be smashed out of existence to make way for a newer-fangled expansion fronting San Carlos.
Are you following me? Excellent. Because despite all this craziness, good things did happen.
On July 16, 1978, for instance, legendary San Francisco guitarist Ronnie Montrose played a show at the convention center with a then unknown band called AC/DC opening up. This was back when singer Bon Scott fronted the band, but before “Highway to Hell.” To my knowledge, this was Bon Scott’s only appearance on a San Jose stage. And it was in that building, before it was used for carpet sample displays and vacuum cleaner demonstrations at Tapestry in Talent every year.
Later in the ’80s, though, as the new convention center neared completion, the city was already in the process of erasing yet another neighborhood to build the arena. As before, good things did eventually happen. The other three times AC/DC came to San Jose—1996, 2000 and 2009—the band was big enough to play at the arena. It all worked out.
Now that Parkside Hall is getting demolished, the ghosts of Bon Scott and Ronnie Montrose will enjoy haunting the new Park Habitat project. The 2,800 fans who saw them at the original San Jose Convention Center were darn lucky.
I was actually at that show. I remember Ronnie was also touring with Edgar Winter as part of his band. They put on a great show. My biggest memory is that not knowing who AC/DC was, I just did the warm up act thing and hung out near the back of the hall. About half way through their set, and I’m already loving it, Bonn runs through the audience with Angus on his shoulders playing the guitar parts of what ever song they were doing. Great show!