St. James Park is an historical novel about San Jose and its environs, a region that existed long before there was a phenomenon called Silicon Valley. The valley had always been desirable for its sunny climate, plentiful agricultural bounty, available timber, and a constant source of fresh water. When the Spaniards arrived, San Jose was established in 1777 as the first pueblo in what was known as Alta California. When Americans invaded less than a century later, the town was celebrated as the state’s first capital until the newly formed California legislature decided to move it elsewhere.
San Jose had promise, but the furor for gold created wealth and fame for San Francisco, fifty miles to the north. Sacramento was eventually chosen as the state capital in recognition of its proximity to the mines. San Jose remained on the periphery, concentrating on its fruit-bearing orchards as well as its vineyards to make wine—until most of latter succumbed to the phylloxera epidemic in the 1890s. After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco gained new celebrity as ‘The City That Knows How,’ becoming the mercantile hub of the West. San Jose was doomed to a less elegant sobriquet: ‘The Prune Capital of the World.’
San Jose capitalized on its orchards, eventually becoming the largest canning and dried-fruit packing center in the world. By the early twentieth century, thirty-eight canneries and thirteen packing plants were the economic engine that enabled the town to bloom again. With a population swelling to 57,000 in 1933, San Jose was too big to be called rural but too spread out to be urban. The city built up its compact downtown to create civic pride and promoted a new identity: ‘The Garden City.’
During the Prohibition era, San Jose gained yet another moniker: ‘The Wettest Town in California.’ While savvy businessmen capitalized on the wealth to be made from liquor and other illicit pursuits, tensions rose between the Drys and the Wets, between ethnicities and religions, between the lawful and the unlawful. San Jose was similar to many cities and towns throughout the nation; it had a wealth of corrupt politicians and money-grubbing businessmen. And though there was a nostalgia about “The Garden City,” the town reeked of speakeasies and sleazy dives.
St. James Park takes place during the overlap of the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Depression exacerbated the general unrest. Jobs began to disappear, and for those who had found employment in the fruit orchards and canneries, their wages plunged rock bottom. Beleaguered workers in San Jose began to fight back.
The headline-grabbing savagery of that November 1933 night changed all that nostalgia. It set back San Jose’s civic pride for decades.
San Jose had a sense of shame and perhaps a perpetual inferiority complex vis-à-vis San Francisco. This insecurity may have been the motivation to revitalize its downtown decades later.
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