Lost Bay Area Stories

The San Jose Mercury had a nice travelogue of a day trip from San Francisco all the way to Stevens Creek Canyon and the sights along the way. One of the highlights is the 'Royal Palms' that lined a street in Cupertino near the entrance of the canyon. Surprisingly, the scene still can be experienced today at Palm Ave. T. A. Skinner, manager of the Winton Company, gives the following description of a beautiful trip which would make the weekend motor car outing delightful as w

Around 1912 - 1916, San Jose constructed an artificial lake where the Guadalupe River and Los Gatos creek converge downtown.

I'm fascinated by abandoned or defunct railroads and their histories, especially if they were in my neighborhood. Here's the story of the Saratoga & Almaden Railroad (1884 - 1886) as best as I can reconstruct it. Incorporation and the Plan According to the San Jose Herald article on October 12, 1885, the railroad was to be built from Murphy's (Downtown Sunnyvale Caltrain station) to Saratoga and then onward to New Almaden (San Jose Almaden Valley area). There are subsequent

Frank Capra's movie "It's a wonderful life" is one of my all time favorites and it's incredible to me that the little village of #Saratoga, CA would be on anyone's map in Hollywood. It probably had something to do with starlets from Golden Age Hollywood such as Joan Fontaine (Academy Award nominated Rebecca and winner for Suspicion) and Olivia De Havilland (Gone with the Wind) having grown up and started their acting careers there in the 1920's. In any case, #DonnaReed, who

In 1908, H.C Brooks, a native of San Jose, invented a new way of integrating a bike pump into the frame. Pretty clever idea although the added weight seems like it would be prohibitive. Knowing modern road bike culture and how that measure weight up to the milligrams, I can see why this didn't gain popularity. An excerpt: H.C. BROOKS of 13 1-2 South Market street, In this city, is the inventor of a patent for carrying a pump with a bicycle which seems likely to be much used

About 100 years ago, legendary baseball players such as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb came to San Jose to play at Soldality Park. Here are some pictures from the San Jose Museum that I colorized using DeOldify. Three thousand baseball fans, old and young, watched Babe Ruth pull an old bat up and down, knock the dust off his shoes at Sodality Park in San Jose, California in 1927. Location Bounded By San Carlos St, Royal Ave and Auzerais Ave. ( the old Orchard Supply Hardware location

Alphonse Trinqual was an eccentric hermit that lived in Mayfield, CA and built an ark in order to survive a second biblical flood.