Sharyn Chan Namnath and Andrea Johnston painted this chalk mural, sponsored by the 13th Street Cats rescue group.

Today the Luna Park Business Association hosted the second annual Luna Park Chalk Art Festival in Backesto Park. At least a couple of dozen artists got together to paint sidewalk murals with chalk and pastels. The artists ranged from chalk art festival circuit riders Wayne and Cheryl Renshaw and well-known local muralist Paul J. Gonzalez, to enthusiastic high school and elementary school artists.

Meanwhile, accordionist Mike Zampiceni and dancers from Movimiento Cosmic Aztec provided entertainment, and North 13th Street restaurants served refreshments. The event drew plenty of visitors, and there was always a crowd admiring each of the artworks.

The Renshaw’s work was particularly fascinating as they used computer image manipulation to create an image with proportions adjusted to look natural when foreshortened by viewing from an angle. Viewed from most directions the image is distorted and surreal, but viewed from directly below their soccer playing figures become surprisingly lifelike and almost seem to stand out from the sidewalk.

Soccer player mural by Wayne and Cheryl Renshaw

Officer Sanchez had goodies for the kids.

A couple of photos from the National Night Out event in the Northside.

Face painting

Neighbors were practicing tight rope walking.

Guru's Market today.

I was recently pointed at a discussion thread on Yelp!, on the topic of the proposed Little Italy district somewhere near downtown San Jose. The post that caught my eye was near the top, where Anthony B. says “Gurus liquor store was the first grocery store in San Jose, Jeoy Francos PW, and it was Italian owned.” Earlier investigation had led to the information that the Guru’s Liquor building was built in 1934 by the same contractor who had earlier built my house, back in the 1910’s; so I wanted to find out if he had really also built San Jose’s first grocery store, and started the Joey Franco’s chain that’s still around today.

Unfortunately, it turns out Anthony B.’s claim isn’t quite true, but there is an interesting story connecting the building and the Franco family.

First, this wasn’t a Joey Franco’s PW Market. As the story is told on the PW Markets community page, Joey Franco started out in the grocery business working for his cousins, the brothers Henry and Joseph Franco, at their Franco Brothers Markets. The 13th and Washington Street store was one of theirs, and it was known as Franco’s 13th Street Market.

Second, this wasn’t the first grocery store in San Jose. It wasn’t even Franco Brothers’ first store. Visiting the California Room at the San Jose Public Library to review the old city directories, I found out that as early as 1925 they had a store on Santa Clara Street. It might have moved in the interim, but in 1932 they were located at 5th and Santa Clara, a site that is now, I guess, buried beneath City Hall. One of the key selling points was their own “$25,000 Ice Cream Factory”. They built the 13th Street store in 1934, and by 1945 they had added a third store on The Alameda. They were still listed in the directory in 1950, but by 1960 Franco Brothers were out of business.

So, what’s now Guru’s Market and Liquors wasn’t actually San Jose’s first grocery, and it wasn’t Joey Franco’s PW Market; but it was Italian-owned and in the Franco family. And that’s still a nice piece of San Jose history to keep in mind.

Franco's Thirteenth Street Market, circa 1945.

Shots in the 'Hood will be shown from March 18 to April 1. Photo: Liv Ames.

Local photographer Liv Ames’ photographs of life in the Northside will be shown at Joyce Ellington Branch Library in a show called “Shots in the ‘Hood”. The show will be opened with a coffee reception Wednesday night, March 18, from 6 to 8 pm, and runs for two weeks, ending April 1.

I’ve been running in to Ames around town as I go to the kind of events and gatherings that I’ve posted about here, so I expect the show to focus on neighborhood life, and I’m expecting to see some excellent photography.

Joyce Ellington Branch Library is at 491 East Empire Street, just north of downtown San Jose. The branch was established in 1977 as the Empire Branch Library, largely due to tireless work by neighborhood leader Joyce Ellington. The branch was renamed for Ellington in 2001, and fully renovated in 2008, making it one of the highlights of the Northside neighborhood.

photo: Gabriela Hasbun/Make Magazine

San Jose Northsider Rick Shertle’s article “Compressed Air Rocket”, originally published a few months ago in Make: Magazine Volume 15, just appeared on the Make Blog, where anyone can read it. Shertle gives plans and instructions to build a launcher and rocket that can fly 200 to 300 feet, using paper, pvc pipe, and a few other parts you can get at the hardware store.

The only note of caution from some of the commenters: after the launcher is used a few times, the pvc pipe can become weaker, and eventually it might fail explosively. Be sure to wrap the pipe in duct tape as instructed in the article.

Repair work at the Joyce Ellington branch library.

On my way to work this morning I saw that repair work has begun on the Joyce Ellington branch library building in the Northside. The building was damaged on Sept. 7 or 8 when a police chase ended with the fugitive crashing into the southeast corner.

Given the need (I hope) for a competitive bid process to hire the repair workers, and the likely state of city finances, I’m impressed that they’ve gotten started working on this just a month after the damage happened.

The owner of this house wants to demolish it and four other units on the property to build new houses.

A proposed property development at the corner of N 15th St and Berryessa Rd has caught the attention of nnasj, and was also a discussion topic at tonight’s 13th Street Neighborhood Advisory Committee (NAC) meeting. The property owner wants to demolish five homes, currently rental units, and build in their place four new detached homes.

The property currently contains two Spanish-style bungalows, one of which has three attached apartments. The courtyard between the two buildings is paved and used for parking. The three apartments look to be incredibly small, maybe only one or two rooms each, and built with minimal architectural detail at minimum cost. The two bungalows, though, presumably are considerably older, and have the kind of style that would make them terrifically desirable if they were only freshly painted and located in Willow Glen.

The owner wants to knock all of that down and replace it with four contemporary two-story houses. In a neighborhood dominated by bungalows, the planning department have somehow concluded that the impact of this change on the “existing visual character or quality of the site and its surroundings” would be “less than significant”, which is at least a highly debatable conclusion.

On the one hand, the proposed new houses will likely fit right in with the Modern Ice townhome development across the street. It does look likely to increase the number of homeowners and reduce the number of rental units in the neighborhood. And it is a characteristic of the Northside that it developed slowly over time, and pretty much all architectural styles from Victorian to contemporary are found in the neighborhood.

But, the early twentieth-century bungalow style is the predominant one in the Northside, and this project proposes demolishing two fairly nice bungalows. This will change the appearance of the Northside as seen by the new residents moving in to Modern Ice, or visiting the new city park across the street.

Furthermore, from an environmental perspective, demolishing and landfilling perfectly serviceable buildings is a colossal waste. Even if the new houses have every environmental feature from double-paned windows to solar panels, they will take years to make up for the energy and natural resource consumption of building them.

As far as I can see, a best-case scenario would be to demolish the three miniature rear units, leaving two Spanish-style bungalows. Then, remove the concrete paved courtyard from the middle of the property and landscape it nicely. Subdivide the property into two lots and sell them to committed owners. Without the cost of building any new structures, hopefully these two renovated homes could pay off just as well for the owner as building four new houses.

Realistically, I doubt if community input is going to change the fate of this property. If the owner is determined to demolish his houses and build new ones there’s not much we can do about it. But, shoehorning four houses into this lot is going to require the owner to get variances from normal building codes; and the community can and should require concessions from the owner (such as designing the new houses to architecturally match the neighborhood) in return for those variances.

National Night Out (NNO) is a nationwide program that organizes individual communities against local crime. Last year, over 11,000 communities across the country, and about 60 neighborhoods in San Jose, participated in National Night Out. Conceived in the early ’80s to increase participation in town watch programs, NNO in San Jose today has shifted emphasis toward improving contact between neighborhoods and the Police Department.

The goals of National Night Out are to

• Heighten crime and drug prevention awareness;
• Generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs;
• Strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships; and
• Send a message to criminals letting them know that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.

Around San Jose, the bay area, and the whole country, volunteers will participate by showing support for their police officers and arranging activities to bring out the community to meet their police, usually in local parks.

In my neighborhood, San Jose’s Northside, National Night Out will be celebrated with an outdoor showing of the movie The Water Horse in Backesto Park, a picnic dinner for 500 people, and DJ music by Northsider Victor Tapia. The picnic dinner begins at 6 PM, and the movie will be shown at dusk.

If your neighborhood has a National Night Out event planned, please leave us a comment and let us know.

The market is open from 8 to 4 and admission is free for shoppers. Proceeds from the vendors’ fees benefit the Northside Neighborhood Association, San Jose’s oldest neighborhood association.