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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in San Jose, California.
Official Website
Overview
San Jose (/ˌsæn hoʊˈzeɪ, -ˈseɪ/; Spanish: [sa%C5%8B xoˈse]; Spanish for '"Saint Joseph"'), officially the City of San José, is the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley, and the largest city in Northern California (both by population and area). With an estimated 2018 population of 1,030,119, it is the third-most populous city in California (after Los Angeles and San Diego) and the tenth-most populous in United States. Located in the center of the Santa Clara Valley, on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, San Jose covers an area of 179.97 square miles. San Jose is the county seat of Santa Clara County, the most affluent county in California and one of the most affluent counties in the United States. San Jose is the main component of the San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara Metropolitan Statistical Area, with an estimated population of around 2 million residents in 2018. It is also the most populous city in both the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area, which contain 7.7 million and 8.7 million people respectively.
San Jose is a global city, notable as a center of innovation, for its affluence, Mediterranean climate, and extremely high cost of living. San Jose's location within the booming high tech industry, as a cultural, political, and economic center has earned the city the nickname "Capital of Silicon Valley". San Jose is one of the wealthiest major cities in the United States and the world, and has the third highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zürich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita. With a median home price of $1,085,000, San Jose has the most expensive housing market in the country and the fifth most expensive housing market in the world, according to the 2017 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. Major global tech companies including Cisco Systems, eBay, Adobe Systems, PayPal, Broadcom, Samsung, Acer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Western Digital maintain their headquarters in San Jose, in the center of Silicon Valley.
Before the arrival of the Spanish, the area around San Jose was inhabited by the Tamien nation of the Ohlone peoples of California. San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first city founded in the Californias. It then became a part of Mexico in 1821 after the Mexican War of Independence. Following the American Conquest of California during the Mexican–American War, the territory was ceded to the United States in 1848. After California achieved statehood two years later, San Jose became the state's first capital. Following World War II, San Jose experienced an economic boom, with a rapid population growth and aggressive annexation of nearby cities and communities carried out in the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid growth of the high-technology and electronics industries further accelerated the transition from an agricultural center to an urbanized metropolitan area. Results of the 1990 U.S. Census indicated that San Jose had officially surpassed San Francisco as the most populous city in Northern California. By the 1990s, San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley had become the global center for the high tech and internet industries, making it California's fastest-growing economy.
The large concentration of high-technology engineering, computer, and microprocessor companies around San Jose has led the area to be known as Silicon Valley. Area schools such as the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, San Jose State University, San Francisco State University, California State University, East Bay, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University pump thousands of engineering and computer science graduates into the local economy every year.
San Jose residents produce more U.S. patents than any other city. On October 15, 2015, the United States Patent and Trademark Office opened a satellite office in San Jose to serve Silicon Valley and the Western United States. Thirty-five percent of all venture capital funds in the U.S. are invested in San Jose and Silicon Valley companies. By April 2018, Google was in the process of planning the "biggest tech campus in Silicon Valley" in San Jose.
In January 2014, Forbes Magazine reported that Careerbliss.com had ranked San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area as the happiest place to work in the United States. The report cited a large concentration of technology jobs that typically offer a high salary and opportunity for growth, in addition to companies providing "fun and innovative work environments" as some of the reasons for the ranking.
High economic growth during the tech bubble caused employment, housing prices, and traffic congestion to peak in the late 1990s. As the economy slowed in the early 2000s, employment and traffic congestion was somewhat diminished. In the mid-2000s, traffic along major highways again began to worsen as the economy improved. San Jose had 405,000 jobs within its city limits in 2006, and an unemployment rate of 4.6%. In 2000, San Jose residents had the highest median household income of any city in the United States with a population over 300,000, and currently has the highest median income of any U.S. city with over 280,000 people.
On March 14, 2013, San Jose implemented a public wireless connection in the downtown area.
Links
List of Museums & Institutions
Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose
History Park at Kelley Park
Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, home of the largest Beethoven collection outside Europe
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, the largest U.S. public library west of the Mississippi River
Mexican Heritage Plaza, a museum and cultural center for Mexican Americans in the area
Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, is an inclusive contemporary arts museum grounded in the Chicano/Latino experience
SoFA District, a downtown arts and entertainment district
Portuguese Historical Museum
Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on display in the western United States, located at Rosicrucian Park
San Jose Museum of Art
San Jose East Carnegie Branch Library is notable as it is the last Carnegie library still operating in San Jose.
The Tech Museum of Innovation
San Jose Steam Railroad Museum, proposed, artifacts and rolling stock are kept at the fairgrounds and Kelley Park
History San José
Japanese American Museum of San Jose, a museum of Japanese-American history
Old Bank of America Building a historic landmark
San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, the first museum in America dedicated solely to quilts and textiles as an art form
Viet Museum, a museum of Vietnamese-American history