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IBM Building 25 Destroyed by Fire

Fire destroyed another historic building in San José, Building 25 on the IBM campus in southern San José. The building was the center of a controversy pitting preservationists against Lowe's who had planned a new store on the site, and wanted to demolish Building 25. Building 25 was designed in 1957 by architect John Bolles and was arguably the first of the modern low rise office buildings in San José. It featured floor to ceiling windows, a design motif reminiscent of a punch card, and a horseshoe pit. The building housed advanced development and research on disk drives.  The building was a source of pride for IBM. In 1959 CEO Thomas Watson Jr. escorted Soviet Premier Nikta Khrushchev on a tour of the building. Reportedly Khrushchev was more impressed by the cafeteria than the building and research happening there. IBM vacated the building in 1996.

Fires destroy historic buildings in San José

Two fires have destroyed historic buildings in central San José. The first fire destroyed the Houghton-Donner Mansion on July 19, 2007.  You can see more on the NBC11 Website. The Victorian masterpiece was built in 1881. It was the home to early San José mayor Sherman Houghton and his wife, Eliza Donner Houghton, a survivor of the Donner Party tragedy. The house had been noted by the Landmarks Commission as "the most historic building in San José". The local preservation community had helped convince the City to spare the building from a risky move or even destruction, as part of construction of parking for the new City Hall. The building was unoccupied, and there were no injuries in the fire, but an important piece of San José's historic fabric is gone.

The second fire on January 17, 2008 destroyed the Porter Stock building, a two-story masonry structure, designed by architect J. Lenzen and built in 1867. Here's the slide show from NBC11. The building was undergoing renovation with funding from the Redevelopment Agency. It had been red-tagged after the Loma Prieta earthquake, as unreinforced masonry buildings from that era are extremely dangerous in earthquakes. This is also a tragic loss.

Historic/Interesting Bridges and Tunnels 

Posted August 25, 2007

At the meeting of the California Council for the Promotion of History last fall, there was a Caltrans presentation of the results of the revised survey of historic highway bridges and tunnels.  (Andy Hope was the project lead on the effort.) In May, KPIX Eye on the Bay had a segment about the other bridges of the Bay Area. Everybody knows the major ones, but there are lots of less well know, but still interesting bridges in the Bay Area.  So here's a map showing both the Caltrans list and the KPIX list. Many of the photo sharing web sites allow geocoding of the uploaded pictures, and there are available plugins to show these on a map like this one.  As if an SIA member needed an excuse to go out and take pictures of bridges...  jay

History San José Web Pages

Posted by on July 1, 2007

In collaboration with KB Homes, History San José has created an excellent set of web pages about the former Del Monte #3  cannery, Cannery Life. This is the latest in a series of web environments documenting historic sites in San José that have been lost to redevelopment. They are a new idea for compliance with Section 106 by the developers of these sites. The Cannery Life site includes oral histories and other interesting features.

Southern California Chapter Exploration

Posted by on July 29, 2007

As the SIA Local Chapter Coordinator, I was approached by Don Huseman about the possibility of forming a Chapter in Southern California. In discussing the possibility, we agreed that putting up some contact information on this web site would be a good place to start. So, if you or folks you know would be interested in helping form a Chapter in Southern California, please contact Don at (310) 547 4604 or

2007 Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tours

Posted by on July 1, 2007

The brochure describing the 27th Annual Oakland Heritage Alliance Walking Tours is available. Many of these have some IA aspects to them. Some of the most relevant ones have been put onto the Forum calendar. Here's a map showing the starting locations of the tours and their descriptions from the brochure. Another form of the map is a KML file that can be opened in Google Earth (which can be downloaded for free from this site.) Right click here,  save the KML file and after installing Google Earth, open it.

Maps & Mashups - Update

A lot has happened in the on-line mapping area since the July 2006 Newsletter article Wikis, Mashups & Maps.  After the fascinating talk by Caltrans Architectural Historian Andy Hope on Thursday, April 19, 2007,  I took a little time to show some of the latest mapping things I've been working on. The first uses the brand new Google™ My Maps package, which lets you create your own annotated maps. As an exercise, I created a map of some of the possible destinations for SIA 2008 tours. These are regular Google maps, with smooth pan, zoom, and integrated satellite/aerial imagery. This is still an experiment, but shows promise and only took an hour or so to create.

An earlier effort started after the talk by Gray Brechin on the Living New Deal Project (originally, the New Deal Legacy Project).  I was quite interested in the project, especially the map of New Deal locations in San Francisco. It was an opportune time, as the team was contemplating the next step in their project, and found the idea of a new type of on-line, dynamically created map to be interesting. I also wanted to experiment with a new technology for creating database driven web sites, Ruby on Rails. After climbing a really steep learning curve, the new database/map mashup went live in December 2006. This is, at best, an "engineering prototype", just a demonstration of what's possible with a modest software development effort. This uses Yahoo!™ maps which have similar functionality to the Google maps (it's a REALLY competitive area).

Another tool is Google Earth. For the 2006 SIA Fall Tour to Ely, NV, I created a file in GPX format of the destinations and recommended extra excursions.  GPX is the standard download format for personal GPS receivers, used in geocaching (high tech treasure hunting). To take a look, follow the note at the end of the writeup on the Fall Tour (the paragraph that starts "Just for fun").